The RPI Players held their annual Evening of Performance—actually four evenings (8 pm on January 30–31 and February 6–7) and a matinée (February 1 at 2 pm). At the Playhouse this past Saturday I was lucky to catch the last showing of the Evening’s series of plays, The Real Inspector Hound, Incident Blotter, and The Bald Soprano.
For the first half of the performance, the Players put on The Real Inspector Hound, in which two critics, Moon (Patrick Kessler ’12) and Birdboot (Ben Brower ’10), watch an exaggerated whodunit unfold onstage. The murder mystery revolves around an escaped madman, lurking around a manor surrounded by treacherous swamps and enveloped in an impassable fog. While the play began rather slowly, the pace picked up with the arrival of the mysterious Simon Gascoyne (Spencer Power ’12). Gascoyne woos Cynthia Muldoon (Erin Morelli ’10), the lady of the house, at odds with his jilted ex-lover, Felicity Cunningham (Jess Johnson ’11), and Major Magnus Muldoon (Elijah Pearson ’07), the half-brother of Cynthia’s deceased husband.
Interspersed between pauses in the play-within-a-play, the two critics discuss Birdboot’s adulterous affair with the actress playing Cunningham, and Moon’s standing as a fill-in for an absent critic. At one point, a phone on stage interrupts their conversation, but no actors enter the scene to pick it up; Birdboot, annoyed, climbs up on stage to answer it—and soon finds himself in the role of Gascoyne, a few scenes earlier.
Power’s performance as Gascoyne was commendable. His dark features and exaggerated expressions fit well with the genre of slapstick mystery theater. Kent Morris ’12 also deserves praise for his role as Inspector Hound, channeling Stephen Fry of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Finally, I commend Ken Bellows ’12 for his convincing performance as a corpse, lying under a couch for the duration of the play.
The second play of the night was written by Chris Guyon ’10, though with considerable help from The Poly, Public Safety, and many mischievous students. Narrated by Matt Sylvain ’12, the play consisted of a number of sketches, based on Incident Blotters (see page 4). Save for a jab at our proofreading abilities, Incident Blotter was uproariously funny. The Players crafted background stories for a variety of reports, including inexplicable thefts, overly protective parents, Alien-inspired Commons tapeworms, and the lexical ambiguity of the phrase “escort service.”
The sketches were rapid and laced with references to one another, giving an otherwise simple idea some depth. Having scratched my head at most, if not all, of the incident reports before they went to print, perhaps I got a disproportional amount of enjoyment out of the comedy, but from the rest of the audience’s reaction I don’t think this is the case. (My favorite incident, from August 11, 2008—involving teenagers carrying a mysterious smoking orange box through the Union—did not escape Guyon’s perusal of our archives, but disappointingly lent itself to only a few seconds of stage time.) I hope that the Players consider putting on another, updated Incident Blotter again before I graduate.
The final show of the night was The Bald Soprano, Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play based on how he learned English. According to the director’s notes, “The play follows two British couples,” the Smiths (Ashley Brennan and Andrew Kayserian ’09) and the Martins (Keegan Trott ’10 and Kristie Norris ’09), “who proceed to have an evening of forced empty conversation full of one-upmanship and humor.” Sadly, it would seem that absurdist theater is too highbrow for me and most of the audience at Saturday’s performance; I could not extract any meaningful storyline from the interminable scenes, which usually entailed the same line of dialog repeated ad nauseam. The play mercifully ends with the couples shouting, “It’s not that way; it’s over there!” repeatedly at each other. Why? I don’t know.
Overall, the Evening of Performance was a success. The show was enjoyable—even if indecipherable at times—and filled with strong talent from all of the Players. I look forward to The Unfinished Song and Assassins in the upcoming months, and the next Evening of Performance in 2010.
