“I don’t listen to filth and garbage about my friends.”
Such words were a sharp injection of irony as part of Boston University’s Stage Troupe’s production of “Rumors.”
BU’s oldest student performing arts group performed the comedic play at the Tsai Performance Center during Family and Friends Weekend from Oct. 18-20.
“Rumors” is a comedy by playwright Neil Simon that premiered in 1988, depicting the events of a New York dinner party gone south.
When couple Ken and Chris Gorman arrive at their friends Charley and Myra Brock’s house to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, they stumble upon a mysterious scene. Charley, the deputy mayor of New York, is suffering from a gunshot wound across his ear, and Myra is missing from the scene.
In a frenzied panic over the damages this “scandal” would inflict on their lives, Ken and Chris scramble to conceal the truth from the other party guests. To thicken the plot, rumors of infidelity between Charley and Myra swirl as the other guests arrive and learn about the fate of their hosts.
The design of the production effectively set the scene. The production crew effectively transported the audience to the living room of an affluent politician’s manor from the 1980s with additions including a grandfather clock in the corner and an abstract painting with a foreboding pair of eyes.
Gavin McCrevan, a freshman, was the highlight of the production as attorney Ken Gorman.
Throughout the production, McCrevan’s flamboyant stage presence — with highly exaggerated movements and hysterically loud dialogue — was met with laughter from the audience.
The peak of McCrevan’s performance came when Ken became partially deaf after accidentally shooting Charley’s gun next to his ears. This resulted in Ken misunderstanding the other characters in hilarious ways, further adding to the spread of non-credible information amongst the party guests.
The snobbery and shallowness of high society was perfectly encapsulated in the character of Claire Ganz, played by senior Christa Campbell. Claire’s frequent focus on trivial matters during the crisis satirized the tone deafness often associated with the elite class.
Campbell accomplished this comedic feat through the stressing of syllables in her speech and her questioning of which charity galas the women wore their gowns to.
Campbell made Claire’s coldness and self-centeredness most apparent when she stopped at numerous points during the production to reapply her lipstick, much to the scolding of her husband, Lenny Ganz, played by senior Matt Luponio.
Although most of the couples at the dinner party had friction in their marriages, none of them were as explosive as Glenn and Cassie Cooper, played by junior Sam Wilkins and freshman Valeria Bigott.
Throughout the play, Cassie accuses Glenn, a politician running for the New York State Senate, of having an affair. She expresses her boiling rage at her husband through hysterical fits and a punch to the nose. Bigott embodied a similar self-involvement to Campbell, but even whinier.
Under the circumstances of the evening, Glenn makes his best effort to maintain the smooth composure of a politician. Speaking in a tone fit for a televised campaign advertisement, Wilkins’ futile attempts at both distancing himself from the “scandal” and dealing with Bigott’s erratic behavior captured the phoniness that is prevalent in politics.
Although there were noticeable technical difficulties with some of the actors’ microphones, the impacted performers adjusted their stage voices in seamless manners, which rang true to the most popular phrase in theater: “The show must go on.”
Rather than solving the mysteries at large, the play’s uncertainty shows the audience just how murky and inconclusive ‘rumors’ can be.
