Virgin Zoo Actors Heat Up '4play' with Satire First-Year Show Bends Old Trends with Lighter Look at Relationships

Author: Laura Rockefeller

This past weekend's "4play," a pleasing collage piece about relationships that Hepburn Zoo audiences have come to expect from the annual First-Year Show, had a refreshing twist this year - the whimsical short play "The Ugly Duckling" by A.A. Milne (of "Winnie the Pooh" fame).

The second piece presented, "The Ugly Duckling," tells the familiar fairy tale of the princess with a good heart but lacking beauty. She can't seem to find a prince willing to marry her until her true love appears on the scene and brings out her beauty from within. With vibrant, over-the-top performances from all the actors complemented by truly outrageous fairy tale costumes, "The Ugly Duckling" proved a charming and fun segment of the show unlike the serious, introspective work that characterizes the majority of performances in the Zoo.

From the vain Queen continually admiring her fingernails to the seductive, giggling chambermaid swinging her hips, all of the characters were delightfully quirky and unafraid to make fun of the fairy tale stereotypes in the same context that Milne did in his satirical writing of the play.

Amidst these colorful surroundings, Prince Simon and Princess Camilla, played by Ben Davis '07 and Lauren Turner Kiel '07, still stood out as the stars of the show. They were completely convincing as the naÔve Prince and Princess who, unbeknownst to each other, both switched places with their servants to get a look at their betrothed without revealing their identity.

Their interactions were charming and perfectly genuine as the Princess gradually lost her awkward exterior and grew softer to fulfill her godmother's prophecy that she would turn out to be beautiful on her wedding day.

The evening opened with David Auburn's "Miss You," a humorous but cynical look at a tangled web of relationships among four people and the various needs that tie them together.

Muchadei Tichafa Zvoma '07 gave a particularly entertaining performance as a slick business man switching back and forth between telephone conversations with his wife on one line and his lover on the other. The spotlights switched on and off the various actors as their spouses or lovers put them on hold, which highlighted to the humorous switches between the characters' boredom with the old loves and excitement over the new.

Dorothy Parker's "Here We Are," which followed "The Ugly Duckling," began comically as a man and woman of the late 1920s boarded a train to begin their honeymoon with just one thing on their minds - one thing that it would be completely taboo to mention - the wedding night.

Lucy Faust '07 successfully portrayed the prim little lady's nervousness every time her husband approached the subject of what might happen when they return to the hotel, but the segment was just slightly too long. The joke of the man coming close to saying something unseemly and being checked by another nervous outburst from his wife - whether about him not liking her hats enough, or liking her sister too much - was very funny at first, but quickly became overdone.

The final piece, John Patrick Shanley's "The Red Coat," left the evening on a happy and romantic note, bringing the audience back from the land of fairy tales to the college scene as two shy teenagers met outside of a friend's party. The two actors, Laura Harris '07 and Conor O'Neill '07, were perfectly cast. Their excitement over their understanding of the importance of the red coat was truly infectious.

The evening as a whole was a very enjoyable experience. Hopefully audiences in the Zoo will see more of all of these actors in their years to come at Middlebury.