People are often expressed with two sides, for example: evil twins, Dr. Jekyll and Tom Cruise. Observers latch on to the first impression, perhaps only viewing the dark and twisty without knowing the goofy and fun that flows when jumping on furniture with Oprah.
Or the goofy could be just after the intermission, as the case is in “Ponies, Shovels and Darkness,” a two-part student production that offers a view of both sides.
The first half of the play is titled the “Chamber Door Trilogy.” It is a dark look at a self-absorbed writer frustrated by writer’s block and feeling guilty for denying help to a woman in need. His guilt leads to his own self-torture. He is plagued by Edgar Allen Poe’s raven and then becomes trapped in two of his short stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Khoa Pham, a senior in arts applications and the director of “Chamber Door Trilogy,” said he used the raven as a metaphor for a guilty conscious. He did this because Edgar Allen Poe always picks specific causes to express through the entire work, like fear and guilt, which are the themes for Pham’s production. Michael Murray, a sophomore in electrical engineering, said he plays the “narrator slash writer slash speaker. I am quite a slasher.” Murray identifies his character, and the entire first half of the play, as dark like Poe’s work.
“I think it makes it so cool,” he said. “Not like today’s [horror], where it jumps out at you — this is more like creepy. I like being creepy.”
After an hour, Pham’s first half draws to a close in the black box studio at Thompson Theater and there is about a 10 minute break before the craziness takes over.
The second half has come to be called by the actors the “antithesis” of Pham’s invention. Directed by Cory Livengood, a senior in communication, it is his adaptation of Michael Green’s Four Scenes for Coarse Actors. Lucy Smitherman, a student in Lifelong education with three characters in the play, said “coarse actors” meant bad actors.
Livengood chose his three favorite scenes from Green’s work, which he preformed in high school and has been waiting to have an opportunity to do it again since he began college.
“All three are stupid, cheesy plots,” he said. “It’s for theater people, to make fun of the goings-on in the play.”
Mary Guthrie, a junior in chemical and bimolecular engineering who has three characters in the play, explained that the scenes explore what really bad actors do when everything goes wrong.
The first scene is a murder mystery, the second is an opera with no music except for a lone triangle player and the third revolves around a lower class miner’s family, according to Guthrie.
The actors also point past the slapstick comedy to the genius costuming, which helps to create the mood.
One of the actor’s costumes even consists of a cod piece that Brittany Halverstadt, a sophomore in zoology, described as “the pieces that cover men’s junk.”