For evening of one-acts, student directors had 30 days to prepare

Michael Todd
Staff Writer

This past Tuesday and Wednesday, the Shafer Street Playhouse stage hosted “One-derful: An evening of one act plays,” a title that could not do justice to the quality of the performances involved.”One-derful” featured four one-act plays over the course of two 40-minute halves. Each play was performed by VCU undergraduate theater majors and individually directed by a small class of VCU graduate majors.

The project was overseen by Josh Chenard, who teaches the four-person graduate directing class.
“I love this project because it’s essentially double-dipping,” Chenard said. “It’s allowing them to take the work that they’re doing in class, and they’ll also get to put a credit on their resume for directing. We can sit around in class and talk about theory and share scenes … until the cows come home. When you get up and do it, that’s when you really get to see your knowledge and the skills you’re acquired and apply them.”

“One-derful” is the last production Chenard will have a hand in before he leaves VCU at the end of the semester to teach at New Mexico State University, eventually taking over as the head of their theater department. “These aren’t plays with huge sets and musical numbers and costumes. There’s elements of those things, but the directors challenge was to tell a story without those things,” Chenard said.

The directors were given about 30 days total, including casting calls, to organize their one-acts. During this time, classes were not canceled, but reorganized with Chenard viewing the directing process, meeting one-on-one with each director and helping them organize the space. With no budget for set or props, anything on stage came out-of-pocket or was improvised from previously obtained materials.

“I’ll speak for all the directors (when I say that) we were really lucky that these actors showed up for auditions,” Fitzgerald said of the experience. “They are all fantastic. There were a couple … not violent, but friendly arguments over who wanted who. We all really lucked out.”

“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” was the first and longest one-act of the night, totaling at approximately 40 minutes. Directed by Keith Fitzgerald, it tells the story of two dysfunctional characters who, after meeting at a bar and spending a night together, are able to overcome their own shortcomings as they stumble into a sudden yet sincere relationship.

“It’s a story about a relationship that forms (between) two very tortured, beaten individuals who haven’t been shown an ounce of kindness in their lives and just happen to be in the right place at the right time. To me it speaks of the fact that anyone can find solace in something they’re passionate about, which I guess is kind of my metaphor for theater in general.”

Act two opened with the 15-minute “Bedtime,” directed by Sharisse Saunders and performed by Kristin Wilson, a freshman, and Anastasia Graves, a senior. Wilson, the youngest of the two sisters the duo portray, questions her old sister about her thoughts on profound issues such as God and the concept of forever in an attempts to understand her own opinions on the subjects.

“The Problem,” another 15-minute one act directed by Brooke Turner, features an intricate and absurd web of sexual facades imposed and unmasked by a husband (Taylor Ballard) and wife (Caty Regan) to keep their romantic life alive.

For Turner, who has taught middle and high school for the past four years, working with an older cast enabled her to undertake a more challenging style of directing.

“It plays as absurd for most of it, until the very end,” Turner said. “So getting actors out of trying to play something real … to focus not on having a real reaction, but being in a real emotional place was probably the biggest challenge. And they did a wonderful job.”

“There’s a lot of really great stuff done with VCU, not only on the Main Stage, but in Shafer. (Students) may be surprised – they might like the theater just as much as they like seeing a movie. I think they’d be delighted to find out … what the theater world is all about.”

The “One-derful” evening concluded with “Warburton’s Cook,” in which John Warburton (James Murphy) believes that he has discovered unpublished Shakespeare original plays – only for his cook and housekeeper, Betsy (Cat Wheelehan), to burn the manuscripts in the fire used to bake Warburton’s pies.

The conflict progresses after Warburton chastises Betsy for burning the manuscripts, to Betsy’s hurt over Warburton’s anger at her attempts to care for him, and concludes with the two of them brought together over the otherwise unfortunate incident.

“It’s about love and how people can love the same things, but how to make that practical,” Wheelehan said of the play’s themes. “Betsy’s love is a practical love and one that saves, and one of my favorite lines of hers from the play is, ‘Love is in the doing.’ If you love someone, it becomes an action, becomes something that you show.”

“Warburton’s Cook” was directed by first-year grad student Terry Hardcastle, who has spent the past 20 years performing in southern Florida. This was his first time directing in years and his first time directing in Virginia. Now Hardcastle looks forward to spending more time offstage, be it directing, playwriting, or teaching.

“I was blessed with a very talented cast,” Hardcastle said. “I wanted to choose a script that gave actors fun things to do. I saw that they would be making pies on stage, there was going to be flour … I could see the stage littered with the stuff by the end of the play. The challenge was getting it all together.

“When you’re directing actors, they make contributions to the piece, so it becomes collaborative. But for the most part I saw it as a triangle that was moving around the stage because we have three characters and how their positions on stage help to tell the story.”

With yet another successful performance by theatreVCU students and a triumph for graduate student directors, university students can be sure to expect future shows to be equally one-derful.