House lights are on high, splashing white and yellow onto the black walls framing the stage.
Student actors are positioned around the unfinished set in their street clothes while senior Kristen Peters watches her peers work through the script.
They are pacing around the skeleton of a beach house that will, I’m assured, soon be surrounded by actual sand.
This Thursday is the opening night of To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, the latest production of the USM theater department. Student director Peters, her cast, and her crew are busy rehearsing, building, painting and buying sand.
As the cast runs through the script on stage, Peters scrolls through it on her laptop, typing notes. When someone delivers one of the cold, sarcastic quips common to this show, she has no qualms about laughing aloud if her cast does so convincingly.
She is also quick to point out when they don’t quite pull it off.
“I need a little more volume, Cindy,” she shouts to freshman actress Meredith Lamothe (Cindy) from the middle of an otherwise empty row of seats, her face lit by the glow of her computer screen.
“We’re all good friends,” says senior Heather Green, taking a break from rehearsing the title role. “But she’s wonderful about maintaining authority. It’s almost like she thinks of herself as a mother, and we’re the cubs.”
The original poster advertising the show listed professor William Steele as director.
He had chosen the play for what he found to be a compelling story with exciting roles for his students. But when he was told that his previous production, last fall’s Proof, was being considered for inclusion in the American College Theater Festival, he found his obligations torn.
To avoid potential scheduling conflicts, he turned to his student and assistant, Peters, to take control.
“Kristen seemed the perfect choice to replace me,” says Steele. “She’s a joy to work with, very talented, full of promise as a director.”
Having met all of the prerequisites and with a strong recommendation behind her, the senior theatre major began casting Gillian the next week.
While she didn’t have a hand in selecting the play herself, Peters found an immediate connection with the material.
“It might sound dumb, but it seemed sort of fated,” she says. “My father passed away about ten years ago, when I was still pretty young. The whole center of the plot is that this mother and wife (Gillian) has passed away. It’s the two year anniversary of her death, and her whole family is still trying to move on.”
The lead character, widower David Lewis (played by junior Jesse Leighton), is shown to have the most obvious – and potentially self-inflicted – difficulty dealing with the loss.
As the play opens, he’s seen romancing a much younger woman, obsessively stargazing, and calling out for Gillian at the water’s edge.
None of this is easy for his teenage daughter (sophomore Hayley O’Connor), who witnesses every bit of it.
The play’s hook — and not a spoiler, given how quickly and nonchalantly it is rolled out — is Gillian’s re-appearance on the second anniversary of her death.
The ambiguity surrounding her presence is largely what invites the audience into the home of this short-tempered, emotionally fragile clan.
While the project may have fallen into her lap, ambiguity is something with which Peters is quite comfortable in her work: it was the centerpiece of her last directing gig, Death and the Maiden, produced by the Student Performing Artists.
That play was originally set in post-Pinochet Chile, penned by Chilean exile Ariel Dorfman; Peters managed to leave most of the original script intact as she uprooted it to post-Saddam Iraq.
“I just wanted to present the audience with questions more than answers, and I wanted them to talk,” she says. To help facilitate this, lively discussion forums were hosted after each performance.
“You can present ideas,” she says, “and if people go home and they go out to eat after the play and talk about whatever you presented to them, I feel like you’ve done your job.”
Until opening night, her job is guiding a group of her classmates through a squashed production schedule, made even more urgent by the weeklong intermission during which they attended the college theater festival that put To Gillian in Peters’ hands. Against all expectations, Steele’s Proof was not included.
“To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” runs Feb. 14-17 at USM’S Russell Hall in Gorham. For Reservations, call (207) 780-5151.
Cast
David: Jesse Leighton Junior
Gillian: Heather Green Senior
Kevin: Maia Turlo Senior
Rachel: Hayley O’Connor Sophmore
Paul: Joe McLeod Freshman
Cindy: Meredith Lamothe Freshman
Esther: Tarra Haskell Junior