"Lights up," said Olivia Gilliatt '08, sitting in a chair facing the stage with a notebook in hand. It was Monday evening and the first costume dress rehearsal had just begun for Edward Albee's "The Play about the Baby."
Gilliatt is directing "Baby," a completely student-run production, which will be performed in the Bentley Theater on April 20 and 21. Traditionally Albee, the play is anything but conventional; the entire set consists of two chairs, and the characters are simply called Girl, Boy, Man and Woman. What the play lacks in decorated sets and action-driven sequences, however, it makes up for with its mixture of hilarity and tragedy, intense interaction between characters, and the beauty of its language.
Given Albee's visit to Dartmouth next week as part of the Montgomery Fellowship, the timing of the play is particularly exciting.
"I wanted to put this play on the minute I read it last year," Gilliatt said. "But the fact that Albee is coming next week, influenced my decision to put the play on at this time."
Lillian King '07, who plays the role of Girl, said that the play would "give people a chance to see a quintessentially Albee play before he arrives."
To the relief of the actors and the director, Albee will arrive on campus in time for the show. "Albee is reported to be very frightening because of his strong opinions on the performance of his work. Try convincing actors to perform his play in front of him, and you have a real challenge," Gilliatt said.
One of the strengths of Albee's play is his portrayal of young love. "Albee just gets young love," said King. "You read the script and you are like, 'that is every relationship I have ever been in.'"
Act 1 of the play begins with the relationship between a girl and a boy who have just had a baby. The act is funny, fresh and sexual. The boy and the girl nuzzle against each together, chase each other clothed only in bed-sheets and towels, and make remarks like, "I'm hard all the time."
The play is far from a sweet portrayal of young love, however. A cynical man and woman arrive out of nowhere, intent on crushing the naivete of the youth. They threaten to take the baby and play a series of mind games on the couple.
"Albee seems to really like messing with people's minds, and it's so much fun to play a character that does that," Melissa Desouza '08, who plays the woman, said.
While the boy and girl represent the more conventional play and do not interact with the audience, many of the lines from the man and woman are delivered directly to the audience.
"What I love about this play is that it is so multi-faceted," Gilliatt said. "There are real gritty emotional scenes and then there are vaudeville scenes. Everything is representational but the emotions are there."
The vaudeville-type scenes achieve a playful attack on the theatrical process. At one point the man asks the audience, "Where were we at the end of act one?" and the characters then repeat the lines they had previously said. At another point, the man remarks on his lines, saying, "I love this speech." It is this play within a play, and two different simultaneous realities which "make for such an interesting combination of forms," said Jeffrey Brown '05 who plays Man.
The play is also powerful in its ability to mix comedy and sadness. "It's not like many other plays I'm drawn to," Gilliatt said. "Albee has a disturbing sense of humor. He is really cruel, but so funny."
Finally, if nothing else, the play proves itself in the beauty and poignancy of its language. In one of the most thought-provoking lines, the man says to the boy and girl, "If you don't have the wound of a broken heart, how can you know you're alive? If you have no broken heart, how do you know who you are?"
It is these existential questions of who we are, what it takes to love, and what it means to be alive, that dominate the play and leave the audience in a completely satisfying daze.
