If the idea of an average theater production with a few boring characters and a plain set is starting to dull your entertainment cravings, look no further than the Department of Theatre to refresh, revamp and revitalize it.
Running this weekend at the MSU Auditorium is "The Skriker" by Caryl Churchill.
Directed by theater senior Khalid Bhatti, "The Skriker" combines English folklore with modern urban life to create a performance that is bound to frustrate some theater-goers but awe others.
"There's a lot for the audience to take in and try to digest and process, but it's very open-ended," Bhatti said. "It's very rewarding at the end."
Sponsored by the department, "The Skriker" is the tale of a young woman named Josie, played by theater senior Sarah Habel, who is in a mental institution. Josie has been bothered by an underground creature - the Skriker, played by alumna Lacy Coligan - for a number of years. The Skriker continues to grant Josie's wishes, but the wishes are answered with ironic twists.
Josie has been trying to tell her best friend, Lily, played by theater senior Mary Teutsch, that the Skriker really does exists, but Lily won't believe her - until the day Lily sees the Skriker, causing all hell to break loose.
"It's kind of like a twisted midsummer's nightmare," Bhatti said. "It's intricate and it's fantastical.
"I would almost compare it to an ink blot."
And with all the complex changing characters and dialogue, it seems like it would be next to impossible to match costumes and a set to such a fairy-tale story. But surprisingly, it went pretty smoothly for the actors, due to a heap of character masks instead of full-fledged costumes.
"(The masks) are really amazing to look at because the designer and a couple friends of hers found items and managed to put them all together as these really creative things," Teutsch said.
Teutsch plays a pregnant Lily throughout half the performance and, despite having to wear a faux expanded belly, said it wasn't bad. "It's like a big pillow that I strap to my stomach," Teutsch said. "It's pretty light and squishy."
Coligan said that her role as the Skriker is her largest yet, and also her most perplexing.
"It's challenging because my character plays several different people, and there's several different dialects," Coligan said. "It was a little difficult at first because there has to be distinguishable characteristics between them."
But that's a portion of the fun for the audience - watching one character take on multiple parts.
"My character is a shape shifter," Coligan said. "I can change into people or animals, and there's one part of the show where I'm a sofa - where I can be seen by the audience, but the characters can't see me."
In all reality, Coligan said this play isn't your average run-of-the-mill college production.
