Minors in Consumption

The title of this blog entry is overly clever, methinks. I'll explain: last night Susan and I attended a performance of the play The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, adapted by Sean Graney. It was part of Dickinson State University's theatre season. The main character is a French lady suffering from consumption. Being an underaged college student, the actress was, in a way, a minor in consumption. Sorry about the convoluted wit.

Anyway, it was my first time in DSU's Backstage Theater, a small venue for more intimate productions. It looked to seat about 70 or 80 people, but it was very comfortable seating on wide risers with plenty of leg room. The small set had backlit panels, faux-painted walls, and a variety of props, furniture, and set dressing that suggested an era long past. I couldn't say that they all worked in union to suggest the same time period, however; and I wouldn't say that any of them suggested the correct time period or setting (late 19th-century Paris). The costumes, too, were elaborate--some of them quite beautiful--all of them functional--but few of them truly "period."

The music started off appropriate (classical violins for background parlor music) but devolved into melodramatic (the crash of cymbals and swelling of strings came from the sound system as soon as certain Act II scenes ended--presumably to emphasize for the audience the seriousness of the main character's impending death--but I, for one, don't need to be hit over the head with such anvils in order to realize details of plot that I can otherwise see and hear for myself).

The acting was a mish-mash, too, but kudos to Todd Selle, Jesse Tallmon, and Jarvis Jahner for their even, realistic work. Even Lydia Johnson was able to ground her somewhat thankless second-banana role, despite the costumes she was required to wear (purple and red, tight, sequined, side-slit dress = 1800s Parisien couture?!). And Beth Hurt, as the consumptive title character, did fine, too.

I must say that, although the costume and set choices were uneven in terms of appropriateness to the time and place of the play, they were well constructed and quite beautiful--some of the loveliest I've seen on stage in a college production . . . well, maybe any production. I was impressed by the direction of the party scenes, in which 16 or so people had to mill about on a postage stamp-sized stage without distracting the audience from its focus on the two or three characters speaking the main lines at any particular moment. The throng of actors moved across the room; they talked first to this group of people, then to that; they ate and poured beverages and laughed; but they never pulled focus, and that's tricky, especially in such a confined performance space with the audience mere feet away at the closest and mere yards away at the farthest.

Susan's aunt Kathy came over early enough that Susan and I had time to go out for supper (Chinese at King Buffet) before the show. It was a lovely evening out.