“It’s an experience you have to see. There’s nothing like this,” said Emanuel Terrell, sophomore, electronic media and film studies major.
In the tradition of absurdist theatre, this one stands out as especially confusing and vague. Every aspect of this production helped balance out these difficulties, making it, as EMU alumna Brenda Miller said, “Easy to just go with it, and not try to analyze it too much.”
Petey and Meg run a boarding house, and Stanley, a perpetually moody and volatile former pianist, is their semi-permanent tenant. Two men arrive at the house, and it’s immediately clear that they are up to no good. Stanley is their target, though it’s never clear what he’s done.
When a birthday party is thrown for an unwilling Stanley, everything goes south.
The cast was uniformly wonderful, as Petey and Meg, Nick Casella and Kasey Donnelly are perfect polar opposites. Donnelly is just the right amount of matronly hovering and superficiality without caricaturizing, and Casella is robotic and spacy, in an autopilot stupor for most of the play.
Stanley (Joey Kulza) is the main focus of the show, and Kulza is usually more than up to the challenge. His Stanley, however, displays a violent aggression right from the get-go, without letup, which makes it hard for his emotions to build.
This last issue is possibly a directing choice. Mostly, Jennifer Graham’s staging was wonderfully uncomfortable, with actors backing up to a tea tray so suddenly you’d think they’d bump into it, standing on chairs or pitching back and forth to whisper into other actors’ ears. These unsettling actions helped convey the play’s barely controlled chaos.
Tyler Calhoun’s acting bread and butter seems to be flamboyant, eccentric characters, but
here he harnesses that energy beautifully. His Goldberg is a Cheshire Cat figure, outbursts always boiling just below the surface.
Goldberg’s partner in crime, McCann, flourishes in the capable hands of Brendan Kelly. The perfect foil to Calhoun’s malicious calm, Kelly’s McCann is a caged animal, the muscle of the operation, and only happy when drunk or threatening someone.
The character of Lulu seems shortchanged by Pinter—nothing happens because of her or in spite of her; she is simply there. Haley Jugowicz, however, makes the most of her with sultry, bubbly drunkenness becoming betrayed indignation.
Tyler Chinn’s lighting design and Joshua Thorington’s sound design set a compelling and sometimes downright eerie tone.
The sound was subtle, but contributed to the mood of the play. Sometimes the stage went black, and an actor used only a flashlight to point glaringly at others. A cold blue “spotlight of interrogation” provided a surreal moment as McCann and Goldberg spit rapid-fire dialogue at Stanley, trying to force some unknown truth out of him.
The play is set in the 70s, and the costumes would be right at home in a 70s wardrobe. The sets, pastel and spare, also perfectly conveyed the period. This was the first show at Eastern to be designed entirely by students.
It’s wonderful to see EMU continue to produce thought-provoking and ambitious theater. Though this play was brain-bending, the production was thoroughly engaging. Keith Mims, a junior theatre arts major said it was, “oddly humorous. I thought it would be difficult to follow, but I could follow right along.”