Before seeing Saturday's production of The Big Meal, my wife, youngest son, and I decided to grab supper. I wanted pizza, but my wife wanted to try something different, so we landed at a little restaurant just a few blocks east of the theatre. As we ate our hummus and falafel, we chatted about family, work, the future, and life in general. Little did we know that our simple meal together would be an almost mirrored precursor to what we were about to witness on stage.
Given its sharply funny script, Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is one of the few plays I could see over and over again. And while Scott Community College's presentation of this story about two sets of parents discussing a fight between their young sons doesn't quite live up to the brilliance of Reza's dark comedy, director Kevin Babbitt and his cast and crew still nail the play's most important points. That includes the necessary on-stage puking, which is just one enjoyable element in what ends up a rather humorous production.
During Thursday's presentation, actor James Thames seemed out of place in Scott Community College's The Actor's Nightmare, acting like he was acting, offering a limited range of emotions and inflections, and speaking with a note of desperation in his tone. However, his amateurish performance, whether by design or not, actually proved spot-on for this comedy in which a non-actor finds himself forced to perform roles in four plays with no prior rehearsals.
Scott Community College's Who Am I This Time? runs just shy of 45 minutes, and on Saturday evening, I would've been more than happy if the production ended not with a curtain call, but an intermission, followed by a second act in which the cast performed the same show all over again.Subscribe & Listen to Reader Podcasts
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