Well, actually, the small red underwear and pensiveness weren't that unusual, by Carleton performance standards. What was unusual was the fact that all three of the short plays to be performed had been written and directed by students: The True Tale of Cupid and Psyche, written by Jennifer Bigelow '09 and directed by Alex Brewer '12; The Blank Slate Experiment, written and directed by Audrey Carlsen '12; and Volcano, written by Morgan Holmes '11 and directed by Lee Conrads '12.
Cupid and Psyche came first, and was remarkable for the lack of clothing worn by the actors, and also for being very, very funny. The plot centers around Cupid (Bruno)'s hopeless love for Psyche (Lacey Dorman '09), a rather bookish, homely mortal woman who, Cupid fears, will refuse him if she figures out he's a god. Therefore, he forbids her to look at his face – even when he lures her to his sort of godly bachelor pad, humming "Sexual Healing" all the way. Needless to say, this causes problems, especially when Cupid's mother Venus (Amy Murdoch '12, who does an alarmingly good towering fury) finds out about their liaison. The language in the play is an odd mixture of modern slang and classical allusions, which actually works quite well, especially in the case of the comic relief characters. These are Apollo and Mercury (Tyler BoddySpargo '12 and Joe Knoedler '09), who egg Cupid on like a pair of drunken frat boys, and Psyche's sisters Callipysinn and Pulchritude (Makini Allwood '12 and Sara Cantor '11), who gossip like a pair of, well, drunken sorority sisters. Throw in a campy orgy scene, with limbs flailing from behind rocks and bushes, an overabundance of sexual innuendo involving "shooting" people with "arrows", a bit of awkward audience participation, and one horny satyr played by Nathan Riemer '11, and you have a weirdly hilarious show that flipped the idea of "Greek life" on its head by putting the spirit of college into classical mythology, instead of the other way around. It was the longest of the plays that night, but no one was looking at their watch; on the contrary, we were surprised to discover it had been almost an hour when the play ended.
The Blank Slate Experiment opened with a bang: D is gone. That's what C attempts to tell A and B, but they refuse to listen. The three letter-named characters live alone in a bare room where bags of cereal are delivered to them through a slot in the wall. They wear plain black garments and sleep every night in the same idiosyncratic poses – feet propped up on the wall; hands flat on the ground; curled on one side with an elbow sticking out in front. For all they know, this is all there is to existence, but the disappearance of D, their fourth companion, puts ideas in C's head about the possibility of an outside world. A, however, is content with the status quo, and needs to suppress C's ideas in order to maintain her sanity. B, meanwhile, seems nearly drugged and completely oblivious, counting out her daily Cheerios with a manic self-satisfaction. The drama hinges on whether or not the characters will give up the safety of their little world and open their minds to the previously unimaginable. It also hinged on excellent performances by all three actresses: Anna Swanson '12 as the frustrated iconoclast C, Casey Markenson '12 as the well-meaning but clueless B, and Emmamarie Haasl '12 as the terrifyingly domineering, fiercely close-minded A.
Volcano began in a similarly dramatic way, with the main actress, Susan Chambers '10, writhing around on the ground in a gas mask as three other characters stood, crouched, and lay immobile around her. Volcano is a one-woman show about the eruption of Vesuvius, with the main character (called only "Woman") giving a soliloquy about her experience with the loss of her orchards and her son. Unfortunately, much of the dramatic tension in this play was neutralized by an unusually slow delivery, full of pauses that broke up the flow of sentences and made it difficult to follow what was being said. There was not much variation in the emotions of the main character, so that while it was clear she was distraught, it was unclear what each individual statement she made was supposed to signify emotionally. The play ends with the woman freezing in place in imitation of one of the preserved casts of bodies we know so well, and tourists, one of whom looks uncannily like the child she lost to the volcano, coming to gawk and take pictures of her.
The three plays created an interestingly varied show that ranged from melodrama to philosophy to pure camp. All three were a testimony to the creativity of Carleton students. Plus, at a performance with both existentialism and skimpy underwear, everyone's bound to find something to like.
