A group of Dartmouth students is putting up an original piece of theater called “Be the Boy” at The Tank in New York City next month. The performance is part of the LimeFest theater festival for emerging artists.
The “wild absurdist” piece, written by Eloise Langan ’27, was originally presented as a staged reading in the fall at Dartmouth. It chronicles two sisters grieving their mother and the strange anthropomorphism of one of the girls’ organ. The group came together through Dartmouth student theater companies and theater department plays.
Director Alex Campbell ’26 said he was drawn to the play because of the way it dealt with profound themes related to gender.
“Part of what I loved so much about the script is how gently and vulnerably it deals with a lot of difficult topics — grief, sisterhood, motherhood — in a very open-ended way that allows the audience to dig their teeth into the play in whatever way resonates most with them,” Campbell said. “The way [Langan] uses metaphor and absurd imagery is really evocative.”
Langan said she was inspired to write “Be the Boy” after getting sunburned on the Jersey Shore and proceeding to “peel all of this, like dead skin off of my leg,” which is now the opening scene of the play.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this idea of like a part of me coming off and manifesting in this, like, pile of itself feels like it could be something I could write about,’” she said. “So I started writing a scene about two sisters, and it kind of turned into this wild absurdist thing.”
The title reflects the broader “investigation of gender” in the play, Langan said. The phrase is used in the play when the two sisters enact a wedding — something Langan used to do with her sister — and “one of them always had to be the boy.”
“In the play, one of the sisters Marie gets her appendix removed, and the appendix comes out and is like an anthropomorphized version of itself, and is a character, and it is somehow male – so he is [also] ‘the boy,’” she added.
While Marie adopts this appendix as a sort of “child,” her sister Theresa is in turn driven to “create her own child out of her sunburnt skin,” according to the play’s technical director Lilla Bozek ’27.
Emma Lefferts ’27, who will be playing Dr. Lewis, an “exaggerated caricature of [the] doctor” who removes the appendix, explained that “[the sisters are] sort of coping with losing their mother by imagining that they become mothers of their own.”
Langan has previously had her work read in the New South Young Playwrights Festival in Georgia. Last summer, she also had one of her plays performed “fully produced” after winning the one-act competition hosted by the theater company Studio3 in New York City, which her friend and “Be the Boy” cast member Lucia Hartray ’27 helps run.
Bozek said the team for this play will also receive funding from the Theater Department’s Kingsdale Fund, which helps financially support students with theater opportunities outside the College.
The cast will reuse the same actors as the staged reading in the fall with the exception of one actor, according to Langan. She described the current rehearsal process as mostly translating the show from a staged reading to full production, “getting scripts out of hands,” and working with a fuller set and costumes.
Notably, one of the characters — the child formed from sunburnt skin — is played by a puppet. Tasked with making it, Bozek consulted former Hop Artist in Residence and famous puppeteer Basil Twist and described the creation as “quite the beast.”
Langan said that although the festival premiere “sounds very daunting,” any nervousness is countered by her recognition that she is surrounded by a “team of collaborators and creatives who I really love and trust.”
Eloise Langan ’27 is the cartoon editor for The Dartmouth.
Vivian Wang ’27 contributed to reporting.
Avery Lin ’27 is an arts editor and writer from New York City. She studies Comparative Literature, including French and Classical Greek, at Dartmouth and also writes for Spare Rib Magazine.
