Five Responses in Ten Days

Apologies, kind reader, for the hiatus in my posts here on Digital Runes. On Monday I completed a brief, ACTF-sponsored tour that invited me to drive more than 1500 miles to five different colleges over the course of ten days.

As I see it, one of the most important services provided by KC/ACTF (a national organization for the advancement of college-level theatre) is that of the “response session,” in which a colleague well-versed in academic theatre is invited to respond to a college production. While I volunteered to respond to these shows, I feel honored by each of my hosts to have been invited to share my comments. I’d like to thank them for giving me an opportunity to see their engaging, challenging, and excellently entertaining work:

Thanks to Colby College for their beautiful, surprising, and reflective production of The Tempest. Those spirits (and their plays within plays) still haunt me.

Thanks to the University of Maine at Machias for provocative social engagement and bold silence speaking volumes in their production of The Moonlight Room.

Thanks to Franklin Pierce College (and particularly to Bob Lawson, for his hospitality), where I found myself transported and challenged by an intellectual, emotional fantasia on Edgar Allen Poe in Dark Cathedrals of the Heart.

Thanks to Eastern Connecticut State University (and guest artist Larry Hunt) for fascinating me with poignant and compelling masks and faces in their utterly engaging rendition of Plautus’ Roman comedy in The Brothers M.

Thanks to Dean College for bringing me Plautus, too, (his play, of course, not the man himself), in a Menaechmi both bold and blatant. This Saturday evening was sexy without being cheap, brave without being rash, and kept me laughing all the way home.

Many thanks to Jim Beauregard for making the whole trip possible.

And an additional thank-you to Ashleigh Ward (Saint Michael’s College ’04) for inviting me to Newburyport, Massachusetts, for an excellent cap to the entire “tour” via a fully professional production of a new play, Cannibals, whose irony-soaked investigation of the lives of frustrated actresses gave me cause to reflect on why I chose a profession in academic theatre over the performance industry.