Photo by Zoya Azhar ‘20 || “The Song of the Maw” is an abstract and beautiful play, Zoya Azhar ’20 writes.
The Smith College Department of Theatre recently introduced a new play reading series, of which “The Song of the Maw” was the first offering of the semester. Written by MFA student Mary Beth Brooker ’20 and directed by Allison Smith ’20, “The Song of the Maw” was staged last Friday in Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre.
The production was a dramatic reading of a play in four acts, and the readers used their voices to set the scene and create another reality for the packed house.
Troy David Mercier and Sarah Marcus played the “young couple” Axel and Bette, respectively. The rest of the cast was older, depicting characters well in their 90’s. They were played by Valri Bromfield, Court Dorsey, Mordicai Gerstein, Jaris Hanson, Peter Schmitz and Christine Stevens.
The play follows Bette and Axel as they encounter a group of seniors in a cabin in the Berkshires, both parties thinking they were going to have the cabin to themselves, and takes audiences on a strange journey involving an “end-of-life” ritual the “elders” are partaking in.
Although the publicized storyline did not do justice to the complexity of the script and its reading, it did help provide some context for audiences.
The readers captured the audience’s attention, with their oral depictions of the characters sprinkled with physical gestures that slowly built up as act after act progressed.
The reality Brooker provided with her writing was absorbing as is; however the precise usage of just a few props, a lot of physical movements and the power of the readers’ voices created an experience I had not been expecting from a dramatic reading.
The ideas being discussed in the play revolved around fairly heavy constructs like the nature of human suffering and mortal fears and sticking out of these larger themes were tenuous and fascinating relationships, people who need each other but almost seem to get off of the friction in the room.
Dorsey’s character, Frank or “The Ring Leader,” was one of my favorites because even though this was a dramatic reading, I could almost see Frank walking around, as his domineering personality carried the audience through the experience.
Schmitz’s character Lemuel was a crowd favorite at various points in the play and interestingly enough, he offered an entirely different flavor at all of these points. The first few acts his dialogue delivery was bordered by long stretches of silence, accompanied by funny little, robotic movements which elicited laughter from the audience.
And in the later act, he takes on the voice of “The Maw” and this was a mesmerizing experience, which made me uncomfortable but intrigued at the same time.
I found the beauty of the play to lie in the fact that, in the crucial scene where the characters are right in the middle of the “ritual,” the abstractness of the dialogue gave the audience liberty to project their individual thoughts and experiences into the play.
Within that one scene, the lines of the structure and narrative of the play blurred a little, and I felt myself thinking so hard about how to make sense of what was happening in front of me. While a part of me was trying to stay rooted in the play and connect the previous scenes with the present with the future, another part was perfectly content with just going with the flow.
I think this was a particularly powerful point in the play, in terms of how it was written, how it was staged and read, and even how it was acted, because Schmitz really went for it in his role as “The Maw.”
Brooker and Smith’s recent works are published in The Gallery of Readers 2017 Anthology, which is available in the Poetry Center in Wright Hall. I strongly recommend checking their work out.
If this production was any indication, we can expect great things from both individuals.
