Get intimate and go crazy with Unbound

Jackson Reeves Assistant Arts Editor

Three mundane yet resonant subjects drive the common Vassar student to the legal point of insanity: alcohol, liaisons and soymilk. Unbound explores these troublesome topics in unconventional and intimate locations this weekend, April 16-20, as it presents Intimate Space Theater’s “3 Things to Make You Crazy.”

Li Cornfeld ’06 founded Intimate Space Theater the second semester of her sophomore year to break away from the proscenium-arch or black-box mentality of most Vassar productions.

Both of these performance mentalities, one present in the Martel Theater and the other in the Powerhouse Theater, force the audience to sit passively. Neither version allows the audience to experience the performance as if it were part of his or her life.

Intimate Space Theater set out to resolve this problem by staging performances in the everyday spaces of college life, but it only lasted one semester. Lisl Esherick ’08 and Leslie Hamilton ’10 have reinstated the initiative this semester.

“It’s less like informing you that you’re seeing a play as the play starts to blend into its surroundings, so it starts to feel more like real life,” Esherick explained. “A lot of the excitement for us is the fluidity of it and the experience that the audience I think is going to go through.”

Each insanity-inducing issue gets a 20-minute scene in its own intimate locale to work out its problem in front of a five-person audience. Esherick and Hamilton encourage audience members to move around each performance space and get as intimate with the actors as they desire.

Forcing the audience members out of their comfort zones has been a common goal in recent Vassar theater projects, such as the senior theater project Dynamo and the “War of the Worlds” play. But Intimate Space Theater takes it one step further.

“We’re not planning on them talking to the actors or touching the actors,” said Hamilton on the degree of audience participation. “But if they did, then the actors would have to sort of deal with that, because the audience kind of has free will in the show.”

Like the Philaletheis performance “Unwrap Your Candy” two weeks ago, the three distinct yet interconnected scenes combine to comprise the entire “Crazy” experience.

Although individual students formally wrote each scene, the ideas and dialogue in the play arose from improvisational sessions involving all of the actors.

“The consistency comes out of our process in that the scenes all sort of developed from the same group of people,” said Esherick.

Esherick compared the casual and uneven conversational style of Intimate Space Theater’s dialogue to that used by playwright Adam Block, whose “Typographer’s Dream” was performed by Philaletheis three weeks ago.

“It’s like normal conversation. You know, like right now when I like can’t finish a sentence by myself without stopping five million times. But you become really aware of it because it’s so unlike what you’re used to seeing, I think, in theater,” Esherick said of Block’s style, after which Intimate Space Theater’s dialogue models itself.

Since the scenes occur in separate spaces and only five people can appreciate each scene at one time, Intimate Space Theater will perform the entire play four times each night.

The performance progresses like a traveling circus through the campus. Each time it begins, the audience members will convene in Sanders Classroom 311, where they will discover that three students, one of whom is drunk, have snuck into the Faculty Lounge to play the board game Risk.

After this first scene, entitled “I’ve Never Been Invaded Before,” finishes, two girls in a newly formed relationship will take the audience to the Retreat, where the girls find trouble in the second scene, “I’m Not a Fruit Fly and You Should Have Known Better.”

Finally, the audience will head over to the laundry room in Cushing House to learn that “It’s Not a Euphemism, Dipshit,” or rather, experience the third scene, as a woman experiences a bout of hysterics like no other after drinking too much phytoestrogen-laden soymilk.

Daniel Gilberg ’10, who wrote the third scene, tried to explain why the ensemble chose to revolve a scene around the detrimental effects of soymilk, but he came up empty-handed. “I don’t know why it took; it just did,” he said.

All the stories are “sort of about these very mundane subject matter because they’re all sort of drawn from our experience,” said Esherick. “It’s nothing deep.”

“The subject matter is sort of mundane in that it’s something that is dealt with a lot in this situation, especially in a really small college situation,” Hamilton said. “But it’s not mundane because it’s just like a real situation: It gets out of control and it gets to the point where you really sort of care about what’s going on.”