The trials and tribulations of a Troupe

Nowadays, it seems like everyone wants to be considered “cultured.” For example, a friend of mine is leaving in a couple of months for Florence, Italy where she plans to spend the summer enjoying art, learning Italian and finding out whether those rumors about Italian men are really true. Now is that cultured or what?

But for those of us who can’t borrow our parent’s private jet, fly to the south of France and spend a weekend sitting in a drawing room, sipping fine Merlot, eating escargot and croissants, reciting Byron, reading French Cosmo and talking philosophy with a dark-haired, sexy-accented intellectual named Pierre, there is hope. There are several ways to get cultured without having to ingest snail guts and speak French — and you don’t even have to leave BU. In fact, I got my culture groove on this weekend.

Usually my experiencing of new and different things is somewhat limited. That is, rarely does my cultural life exceed a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts to look at the naked statues and play “steal the watercolors from the freaky, over-caffinated art students” or a dinner at Quan’s Kitchen consisting of Chinese food and Coke or a trip to the exotic frozen meat aisle in Star Market.

However, this weekend I went to a comedy show AND a play. OK, so maybe seeing Slow Children at Play wasn’t as intellectually stimulating as staying home and reading William James, but it was damn funny, and I would have to say that the most amusing part of the show was when one of the actors put a plastic bag over his head and almost suffocated himself on stage. It may have not been all that enlightening, but asphyxiation is funny as hell and I definitely had a good hearty chuckle over the poor bastard trying to escape the plastic bag of death before his lungs exploded.

I also went and saw Wandering Minds perform Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” at the Photonics Center. It was also pretty darn funny. And I am not just talking in terms of the plot and lots of grown men prancing across the stage in tights. These people worked humor into EVERY aspect of the production — the scenery, the technical, the lighting, even the theater itself — were all funny.

For example, in act one, the duct-taped curtains fell down on Malvolio, temporarily knocking him unconscious. And in act three, the set, which was held together with thumbtacks and Elmer’s glue, suddenly began to fall apart. And in the act five, the burning hot, UV-emitting, cancer-causing, you-should-be-wearing-SPF-45-under-these-suckers spotlights, which were held to the floor with chewing gum and Funtack, began to wobble while the audience watched in a stupefied horror, waiting for the minute when the lights would come crashing down and roast the little light techie Timmy to death.

The director, crew, and tech of this play were a bunch of geniuses. The rickety stage and set just added to the hilarity. So after the audience watched a sidesplitting finale complete with one of the extras electrocuting himself on the dangling wires, the final curtain (actually it was a sheet hung on a rope with clothes pins) hit the stage, and I leapt from my seat, laurel in hand, to congratulate the director.

We had an interesting conversation. It was surprising to learn that the whole electrocution scene hadn’t been planned. And I am not talking impromptu style here either. Moreover, the reason the stage was falling apart wasn’t because it was supposed to be funny — it was because the set was a God-awful, falling apart mess.

According to the director, the troupe didn’t receive enough funding from the Student Activities Office to create a proper stationary set. Additionally, had they had the money, they still couldn’t have had an elaborate set because it had to be dismantled every night and carried back to dorms (there is little storage space on campus for student groups) because their theater was actually a lecture hall, which is used for classes during the day and most professors don’t like lecturing on stage with a pirate ship. Furthermore, due to a combination of lack of space and typical BU bureaucracy, finding a stage for an unknown theater troupe was next to impossible — consequently, they were stuck in a lecture auditorium with no curtains, no working stage lights, and a small stage that had a podium permanently fixated in the middle of it.

The most money that a theater troupe can be allocated from SAO is $1,800. To me, the average dirt-broke, I-owe-FleetBank-$250-from-my-reserve-credit college student, $1,800 seems like a lot of money. I mean, you could potentially buy 450 banana strawberry smoothies from Late Nite with that kind of money. However, for a new theater troupe, which has no treasury and no props or costumes, $1,800 is not sufficient to cover costume rental, scenery, lights, etc. And oftentimes these actors have to be the stage crew and buy their own costumes, etc.

Additionally, SAO mandates that every purchase be specified for in advance. So if there happens to be a sale on stage lights or pink tights, only 10 percent of the money saved can’t be reallocated for other purchases and the remainder goes back to the SAO.

Many groups have trouble coming up with enough funding for certain activities. However, with over 400 SAO funded groups, the undergraduate student fee only goes so far. And while they may not be able to give out sufficient funding, the SAO member, Christina Arcidy maintains that the SAO “provides a lot of support [for the students] from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at night.”

So unless Chancellor John Silber decides to take a pay cut or fire his chauffeur, for the time being, theater troupes are going to have to rely on the versatility of duct tape and chewing gum and sing in the Kenmore T station for enough spare change to afford some decent costumes.