Women on the Verge

Author: Colin Foss

As three courageous, 19th-century women set off on a safari through "Terra Incognita," the rusty Hepburn Zoo became a lush jungle, an arctic tundra and finally the intersection of time and space. Exploring the romantic dreamworlds with big-eyes and even bigger characters, the pioneering adventurers took their audiences on a trek beyond bizarre.

Only in a venue as isolated as the Hepburn Zoo can an audience manage to sit down in 21st century Vermont and feel instantly transported to a strange, new world - a new world at least for three intrepid travelers from 1888. Their origins are mysterious, and their destination is foggy, but Mary, Alexandra and Fanny have the necessary wits, courage and date bread to get them over the strange landscape of the College's most recent theatrical offering, On the Verge, or, the Geography of Yearning.

Eric Overmeyer's oversized play is a continual stream of dialogue, a welling up of sentiment, and sometimes just an inane ramble placed within the context of a physical and temporal journey. The pilgrimage of the three travelers is a hazily defined-trek through a place called Terra Incognita, which seems to exist on the peripherals of a timeless society. Its name is thrown around alongside such exotic locales as the Congo and Burma, and seems to contain every type of treacherous terrain the earth has to offer. To spice up the plot, upon reentering civilization the women find that they have left 1888 behind and have entered 1955. Why 1955? I'm still not sure.

Their worst struggle, however, is not Overmeyer's textual mysteries, or the bite of the artic snow, or the culture shock of entering a new century. Instead, the three women clash with the language they encounter along the way.

The verbal complexity of On the Verge is what makes this piece especially vibrant. Alexandra, definitely the most comical of the three women, is the first to start exclaiming things before her mind has had a chance to register them.

"I am delicious!" she says, "I mean delirious. Not delicious." Lauren Kiel '07 perfectly captures the horror of Alex's unknown utterances in her 700-level performance. Her words seem like prophetic revelations, surging up from some obscure part of her subconscious to exit her mouth and float over the play omniously. The other-worldliness of her speech achieves an eery yet playful atmosphere that made the performance fuller and invigorating.

Fanny, a romantic grammatician played by Allison Corke '08, is less interested in embracing the future they find than she is in her own story. Corke fills the role so much she stretches the seams. When her husband comes to visit her as an apparition, her desire to return to him is palpable, and her emotion strong enough to cross the terrain her letters cannot. Her romantic tendencies, however, are refocused once she decides to remain in 1955, where she has met a suave nightclub owner named Nicky who woos her with his racy dancing and bubbling jacuuzzi.

Hanging scrims and floating geometric frames formed the barriers of the stage on which Mary, Fanny and Alex trekked across Terra Incognita. The landscape was superimposed on this surreal and bare scene, which allowed a bit of clever directing in the capable hands of Alec Strum '08, and served to enliven the women's visual journey.

Jungles posed no problem to these machete-wielding bushwhackers, whose choreographed, march hacked through the imaginary brush of their surroundings. Despite the stunning visual elements of the performance, the stage seemed a little awkwardly arranged. Definite dead spots muted the action, either through the odd sequestering of certain spaces on the stage or the fragmented seating that removed some of the audience from the spectacle.

The stream of extra characters that the voyagers encounter in terra incognita is navigated by Will Damron '09, who plays eight different roles in On the Verge. The roles themeslves were meant to be overacted. Damron weaves in and out of characters, which included the aforementioned lounge lizard Nicky, a leather-sporting Fonzie look alike, a baby yeti and, my favorite, a German dirigible flyer-turned-cannibal named Alphonse.

What's unnerving about this one-man parade is that the audience can feel that it is indeed all played by one man who does not fully explore their exaggerated personalities. This could be asking a lot of the unfortunate actor who attempts to tackle the dramatic gymnastics of switching characters every minute or so, but the opportunity to add a good amount of variety seemed at least partially lost.

Mary remains at the end of the play the most enigmatic character. Her stern and objective view of her travels makes us wonder what she's hiding within the folds of her scientific subconscious, but we never completely find out. Laura Harris '07 tries to plumb Mary's depths through her sensible and light 700-level performance, but despite her grasp on Mary's outward demeanor, she comes up empty-handed in trying to convey her inner motivations. When her two companions decide to stay in 1955, Mary saddles up to brave the uncertainties of Terra Incognita and continue her journey - a decision which makes the play seem unfinished but not necessarily unsatisfying.

On the Verge is a taxing play for both actors and audience. The language is nuanced and complex while the surreal locales the trio passes through demand an uncommonly imaginitive dexterity. The College's production smoothed out the journey as much as possible and managed to add its own bit of humor and moderation to a show that could have easily slipped into the absurd. Time travel is hard to talk about with a straight face, even in the theater world.