One-act plays will dazzle

Home Culture One-act plays will dazzle

Every other year, aspiring student directors engage in a two-semester training process. They are “thrown into the deep end” and begin by directing a 10-minute play, said Professor of Theatre George Angell. They end with a one-act show.

This year, six one-act shows will show in the Quilholt Black- box Theater.

Sophomore Katherine Denton is directs the one-act “Finn and Euba.”

“The one-act plays are much more substantive than the 10-minute shows,” she said. “We’re incorporating tech for the first time, so I would say that this is the first time I’ve really directed at Hillsdale.”

The directors often face similar problems, said junior Trevor Freudenberg, director of “The Wreck of the 525.”

Actors must make certain their individual interpretations sup- port the “big picture” of the show while remaining true to the details of the script, the student directors said.

“Directing involves you in more parts of the show than you would ever encounter otherwise,” Freudenberg said. “You get to think of the show as a whole, as literature, not just the one perspective of the one character.”

The scripts selected range from “Gadgets,” a stylistic piece di- rected by sophomore Mark Keller and requiring a cast of nine and extensive sound cues, to “Crazy Eights,” a contemporary piece by David Lindsay-Abaire with a cast of three.

“They vary all over the place,” Angell said.

The actors’ experiences also vary greatly, student directors said. Casts include theater veterans such as Caitlin Hubbard, who has performed in seven different roles with the Tower Players alone, to sophomores Ethan Showler and Katie Chandler, who are making their theatrical debuts.

Showler’s role, the lead in “Gadgets,” has 122 lines, but the new actor memorized all of them a week before he was required to, said Keller.

“That’s a mid-sized Shake- spearean role,” Keller said. “Everyone’s working really hard and it’s really paying off.”

Organization is always one of the greatest difficulties student directors face, said Angell.

“It’s the second half of the semester. Everyone’s busy and it’s almost impossible to get everyone in the same place at the same time,” Keller said.

The cast of “Gadgets” did their first reading in the lobby of Benzing Residence because one of their cast members was an resident assistant on duty.

The one-act plays are the only show of the semester requiring tickets, due to limited seating in the Black Box.

“We usually have a full house so make sure you sign up,” Angell said.

Since half of the shows are set indoors and the other half are set outdoors, the two groups will show on alternate days.

“I really recommend that people see both nights, “ said Denton. “Everyone picked phenomenal scripts, all got really good casts. We’re having a lot of fun, and it’s going to be great.”