After a solid day of rehearsing, Beth Marshall called all the writers, actors and directors into the Margeson Theater for a last minute prep talk. Everyone had worked hard all day to to get these six productions up and running. Lindsay Cohen had written a piece about high school girls getting locked in a bathroom during a high school prom. In this piece, Sarah Lockhard played a drugged out youth and she was hilarious. She spun on the floor and used toilet paper to play a game of “He Loves Me, He Loves Me not.” At one point, she put her ear to the floor on one of the colorful circles and started pounding her fist, screaming “Get us out of here!” My favorite line of all the shows was screamed out by Sarah, “ROYGBIV your a beautiful freaking genius!” This was particularly funny because of the colorful 70’s themed “School House Rock!” set.
The night before Lindsay had gone with fellow writer Tod Caviness to the Drunken Monkey Coffee Bar to try and write. The plan backfired when a guy kept hitting on her. He just wouldn’t take the hint that she had work to do. Her play started as a Unabomber dance party, but gradually was reworked into the high school prom bathroom drama we saw. Lindsay wrote all night, and finished at 6:50am and before running over to the Shakes to hand off the script to Laurel Clark, the play’s director.
A production that was like a 70’s sitcom similar to “Sanford and Son”, looked to me like it was going to crash and burn based on the rehearsal I saw. Marty Stonerock, the lead actress in that piece, looked at me while Beth was talking to the assembled group, and she took her scarf and made a gesture like she was being hung, sticking her tongue out comically. In this play, the lead actor, Barry White, craves a drink from his trusted bottle of ripple that he keeps under the desk. Marty had taken the ripple off stage by mistake. As the helpless actor searched for the now missing bottle, Marty finally rolled the bottle into the theater and it got the loudest laugh of the night.
