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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

First-Year Show explores themes of love

A staple of the theatrical calendar each year, the First-Year Show showcases Middlebury’s freshest dramatic talent. This production, the 15th of its kind, was no exception to the trajectory; Hepburn Zoo afforded small audiences of friends and family gathered  Oct. 7-9 with a personal experience, and with eight scenes exploring love, an equally intimate theme.

First-year shows are often the initiation of a Middlebury actor’s career, as they step onto the college stage for the first time. Alum’s are called in to direct these productions; in this instance Caitlin Dennis ’06.5 left work in D.C. to return to Middlebury as director for This Kind of Close. Other experienced theatre hands aid the show through various backstage roles, making the production an exposition of cross-generational skill.

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Going from audition to opening night in just five weeks with a group of unacquainted actors is no small achievement, especially when tackling as broad a theme as love. The format of eight scenes with simple set transitions between each proved a perfect medium for different types of engagements: from exploring how bereavement effects love, to finding your soul mate in a bar. Deliciously rendered awkwardness and the comedy of miscommunication recurred in each scene. This was a funny show, but with humor pitched appropriately so as not to neglect the tenderness of the interactions.

A great success of the show was its approachability, as each scene took a new angle on intimacy and relationships. It was well chosen for the family weekend.  Although mature performances prevailed throughout, perhaps the most successful and appreciated scenes were those that touched upon the most innocent moments. The performances of Matt Ball ’14 and Kristina Johansson ’14 drew torrents of laughter in the penultimate scene of Saturday night’s show as they recreated the awkwardness of early adolescence in Rajiv Joseph’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries.” An optimistic resolution was achieved at the end of the show with the return of two initial characters in a silent embrace.

Another memorable feature of the production was the somewhat surreal set transitions; great white shapes that, with the help of the first-year actors-come–robots, unearthed the furnishings for each scene. The largely domestic settings helped ground the scenes in reality and served not to detract from the central strength of the show: enormously compelling acting. Congratulations are due to all those involved.


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