Acorn

Issue date: 10/3/08 Section: Life & Arts

Media Credit: Courtesy of Amber LaCasse Elyse R. Smith ('09) stars in Bridal Terrorism as a bride, already wearing a dress, in search of a groom.

The Drew University Dramatic Society season opened with two one-act plays. Each act is brimming with talent and several future stars are appearing in Thick and Bridal Terrorism. Act one is Thick by Travis Baker and directed by Becca Schlossberg ('09). Act two is Bridal Terrorism by Bill Rosenfield and directed by Madeleine Rose M. Parsigian ('09).

As theater patrons ambled into the Thomas H. Kean Theatre at the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, incidental music was playing until the house lights dimmed to denote the commencement of Thick. The setting for Thick is "a spot in the woods," according to the program. A papier-mâché boulder and a papier-mâché tree trunk consist of the set representing the woods. Kudos to the lighting designer Lili Ashman ('10) for the graffiti, which is made out of light and appears when the colors are projected onto the boulder and to Leslie Pillepich ('11), the light board operator, for executing the lighting design.

Johnny, played by Matt Miller ('11) and Patrick, played by Patrick Horn ('11) have met in the woods, Patrick is visibly shaken and disturbed, while Johnny plays it cool. Patrick is upset by the suicide of a "kid" who attended their high school, even though he did not know him. Johnny tries to get a rise out of Patrick by asking him, "Do you want to hear something disturbing?" and he continues asking that question three times. Each time, he provides a story that includes animal brutality -and they definitely are disturbing, no doubt about that. At the end of the first scene, the two boys decide to go to the spot, Settler's Woods, where the high school boy committed suicide by hanging. They have brought along an axe, but each time either one of them is about to swing the axe into the papier-mâché trunk, some dialogue gets in the way of it.

Johnny doesn't understand why Patrick cares so much since they didn't know the "kid." Johnny compounds matters when he says that he saw the kid once and heard him talking to himself in the boy's bathroom. Johnny says that the kid was awkward, a freshman, "He couldn't laugh with us as we laughed at him." Patrick also debates whether they could have done something, to which Johnny responds, "We're high school students-we're not people." Johnny makes the point that Patrick is very concerned about the suicide, without even knowing the kid's name.

Continued...

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