PREVIEW: Stop Kiss at USC's Lab Theatre by Rebecca Shrom

What do you want?”

“Sara asks this question repeatedly throughout the show, and I think it is important to ask that now and again,” explains Liz Houck, senior Theatre and Psychology major at USC, who is directing Stop Kiss in USC’s Lab Theater. Stop Kiss is a play about love. Not just the romantic love between a man and a woman, or the romantic love between two women, or two men, but the kind of love that builds from friendships, and all the fluidity that can be found in between.

Stop Kiss, by Diana Son, is a play, set in New York, which centers around 2 women, Callie (Jasmine James) and Sara (Imani Hanley), and their blossoming relationship. One fateful night, when Callie and Sara share their first kiss, they are both assaulted in the park. Callie remains physically unharmed, but Sara is beaten into a coma. The play then continues to jump back and forth between two timelines: the time before the accident and the recovery process. The play explores Callie and Sara’s relationship, their relationships with others, and how many different ways there can be to love someone, whether romantically, platonically, or otherwise.

“Stop Kiss is such a poignant, powerful play that says so much about systemic oppression and broken systems,” Houck explains. She is hoping that will bring back the question of “What do you want?” to the forefront of the audience’s brain. But not only that, she is hoping it will be a catalyst for discussion. She states, “… It’s even more productive to ask more specific questions such as ‘What do you want to change in the world in order to help people like Callie and Sara exist without fear?’ and ‘What do you want to do about the current system?’”

Stop Kiss, despite being published 17 years ago, still remains extremely relevant.  Freddie Powers (George) shares, “[The play] was an important message about violence against queer people when the play was published in 1998 and it's almost shocking how easily adaptable it is to 2015. We didn't have to make any changes in the script because nothing sounds out of place today; the message is still just as relevant.” Houck goes on to explain, “Considering the current social climate regarding race and sexuality especially, there is a call to action to be taken from the show, especially in a state where marriage equality happened in the same year as the Charleston Nine tragedy. How does that happen, and what does that say about us?

Houck also states that the production is going to use glitch art to address the issue of oppression visually. With the help of USC Media Arts MA alum OK Keyes, the cast was led in a workshop, took images from the media, and broke them in order to creat something new.  Houck says, “We are using glitch art as a means to break the systems which oppress the charcaters in the world of the play, which mirrors the world in which we live. Glitch involves breaking the image: the actual code is bent or broken, which distorts the image.”

But in the end, it really all comes back to the idea of love. Everyone should be free to love, and let others love in whatever fashion they desire. Abi McNeely (Mrs. Winsley/Nurse) shares, “There are so many different types of love: romantic, sexual, friendly, combinations of all three... and nowadays, these different types are even more prominent, especially with young people. There will always be people against these different kinds of love, but people love anyway. And that's important. It doesn't matter; love anyway.”

Stop Kiss will be performed in the Booker T. Washington Theater (1400 Wheat St.) on October 15-18 at 8 pm each night. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more information about Stop Kiss or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, contact Kevin Bush by phone at (803) 777-9353 or via email at bushk@mailbox.sc.edu.

 Stop Kiss contains adult language and content 
that is not suitable for children.

Classic Greek “Call-To-Action” Play The Trojan Women Comes to Lab Theatre

The UofSC Department of Theatre and Dance will present The Trojan Women, translated from Euripides’ ancient text by acclaimed scholar Nicholas Rudall, Feb. 26- March 1 at the Lab Theatre.

Show times are 8pm nightly. Tickets are $5, and available only at the door.  The Lab Theatre is located at 1400 Wheat St. in the Booker T. Washington building.

Senior theatre major Kelsea Woods is directing the centuries-old Greek meditation on the brutality of battle, which continues to move and inspire audiences, even in the present day. Euripides’ classic tragedy tells of the fates of the women who remain in the city of Troy after its destruction during the Trojan War.  Woods’ production of the play intends to give audience members a firsthand look at the human cost of war, as told by the women left to survive in the aftermath of their fractured world.

The director plans to use the entire Lab Theatre space, as well as unconventional seating, to immerse the audience in the action of the play.

“I knew I wanted to use different staging elements to really enhance the experience of this play, instead of just watching it proscenium style,” says Woods. “I’m playing with the sensation of place and time, and using design elements as characters almost. The audience will be considered ‘Trojan Women’ and there will be a set of rules to let them know what they are getting into. The whole Lab space will be playing space, the characters have been living their daily lives here, and the audience is walking straight into that.”

Woods’ vision for the production injects a contemporary, urban aesthetic into the ancient, war-torn world of the main characters. She imagines the surviving women of Troy living in a derelict subway, abandoned during the years of violence.

“These women have watched their families be killed and their city be destroyed, and they are waiting to see what is next for them,” says Woods. “But, they aren’t just going to sit around and do nothing.  This play was originally a call-to-action for the Greek people… and I see echoes of that within the Trojan Women themselves.”

Woods says she was drawn to direct the play after spending last summer in London at the American Institute of Foreign Study.  As a scholar with USC Beyond Boundaries and USC Carolina Global Study, Woods conducted research on experimental and immersive theatre.  Additionally, she began a dialogue with Dr. Josephine Machon, author of the pioneering textbook, Immersive Theatres, to further delve into the concepts.

“In my mind, immersive theatre is really an extra-sensory experience,” Woods says about the unorthodox production style.  “It’s really about imbuing all the senses and pulling you into the world of the story as if it’s happening around you.”

Appearing in the production are undergraduate students Jamie Boller, Rebecca Shrom, Cami Reid, John Floyd, Jon Whit McClinton, Jasmine James, Elizabeth Houck, Haley Sprankle, Brooke Smith and Ashley Graham.

“This production won’t be just ‘theatre,’ it will be an actual life experience,” says Woods. “That’s what immersive theatre does — it enhances your ability to intellectualize and interpret the text because you have now lived it, felt it and experienced it first hand. You will come out of this play a different person in some way, shape, or form.”

For more information on The Trojan Women or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, contact Kevin Bush by phone at 803-777-9353 or via email at bushk@mailbox.sc.edu.

"Ajax in Iraq" at USC's Longstreet Theatre - a review by Kyle Petersen

 

It’s hard not to applaud Theatre South Carolina for picking Ajax in Iraq to open its 2014-2015 season. Playwright Ellen McLaughlin forges a conceptually complex narrative that intertwines Sophocles’ original Greek tragedy, a play often used as a discussion tool for military veterans and civilians both to explore the deleterious effects of wartime on an individual’s psyche, with the modern-day tale of a female soldier in Iraq who, after demonstrating a heroism similar to that of the storied tragedian’s protagonist, is raped by a superior officer and suffers from PTSD.   In the process, McLaughlin takes on the politics of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, the geopolitics of the region, the philosophical and psychological issues at the heart of all war, America’s treatment of its combat veterans, and the problem of sexual abuse in the military — all extraordinarily relevant issues for a generation of college students who have essentially spent their entire lives with our nation at war. That’s a lot of meat for this almost exclusively undergraduate cast to bite off.

Fortunately, this talented group were game for a challenge. Both Jamie Boller as AJ, the female protagonist, and Jasmine James as the goddess Athena, who narrates both storylines, shows poise and depth in their performances, with the former giving a nuanced treatment of the dramatic emotional swells her role was tasked with, and the latter providing a dynamic treatment to the lengthy monologues that are often weighed down with the heavy expositional load that the character carries. Reginald Leroy Kelly, Jr. was also a standout, with an impressive physical presence that brought Ajax’s bloodthirsty hysteria to life. The undergraduate ensemble cast as a whole dove into the play with verve, and captured the unsettling but time-honored truth that all wars are fought by children.

It’s also worth noting that the scenic design by Andy Mills was quite astute, with a gorgeously craggy set of stones with the fractured geography of Iraq outlined in chalk, and a small covered pit lowered in the center that provided an important literal and symbolic space for Ajax’s descent into madness. Director Peter Duffy’s blocking and Terrance Henderson’s choreography also made expert use of the theater-in-the-round framework, and the entire production team brought an impressive level of thought and poise to the table.

However, the play itself often felt too limited by its wide grasp. The vast majority of the story was told, rather than shown, to the audience, both by Athena as narrator and the Greek chorus of American soldiers. While on a microlevel McLaughlin’s words had power, the net effect felt too much like a rambling, lengthy, unfocused sermon. Relatively little time was actually spent on the most emotionally and thematically fraught element of the play, the details of AJ’s psychological trauma. Instead, lengthy digressions were taken to incorporate a Victorian spin on the history of the Middle East in the 20^th century and what amounted to a PSA about homeless vets. And, while the Ajax story obviously recognizes the long history of soldiers psychologically traumatized by war, I feel as if McLaughlin did a disservice to AJ’s story by pairing it so unproblematically with the Greek tragedy. After all, being raped by a superior officer is categorically and qualitatively different than failing to be properly recognized for one’s efforts, and apart from actually staging the rape, the play had relatively little to say on the subject, a pity given the enormity of the problem - women who served in the war were more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than die in combat.

That said, the play is littered with powerful moments, among them the deft explication of how soldiers mostly end up fighting for love of one another more than any national, ideological, or moral reason, and a powerfully staged rape scene that placed the actors across the stage from one another and captured a cold, alienating sense of aloneness surrounding that act of violence that’s difficult to connote with a literal depiction. (The play also wisely closed on the lit images of soldier’s graves with the actors taking discrete bows from the edges—a sobering way to keep the focus on the issues rather than the theatrics of the performance.)

There’s no doubt that the subject matter and staging of such traumatic stories are worthwhile, and many will likely leave these performances with a heightened sense of our nation’s collective failure to grapple with the immense psychological damage our decade at arms has caused a generation of American soldiers. But I also can’t help but see the play as a bit too heavy-handed in its polemics and remiss in its elision of the extraordinary gender inequities in today’s military. These detractions limit the ability of the play to contribute to an important, underserved conversation around these issues. Despite McLaughlin’s considerable gifts, Ajax in Iraq will always feel like a bit of a failure because of that alone.

~ Kyle Petersen

Show times for Ajax in Iraq are 8pm Wednesdays through Saturdays, with additional 3pm matinees on Sunday, October 5 and Saturday, October 11.  Tickets for the production are $12 for students, $16 for USC faculty/staff, military personnel and seniors 60+, and $18 for the general public.  Tickets can be purchased by calling 803-777-2551 or by visiting the Longstreet Theatre box office, which is open Monday-Friday, 12:30pm-5:30pm, beginning Friday, September 26th.  Longstreet Theatre is located at 1300 Greene St.