BY MAIA GERLINGER

In print | Published October 22, 2009

All day Tuesday, Oct. 20, the cast and crew of “Outrage” stopped by LPAC whenever they could to help build the set. By 10 a.m., Amanda Klause ’12, the stage manager, was standing outside the doors to the LPAC main stage, making phone calls and sending text messages, trying to coordinate a group of busy Swarthmore students. “I was looking at my Google calendar last night, and I got a headache,” she said.

“Outrage”, which opens on Halloween, is a student-run Drama Board production. The play was written by Itamar Moses, a Yale and New York University graduate. Perhaps a connection might be made between his heavy academic background and the heavily cerebral nature of the play. “I actually have trouble explaining to people what “Outrage” is about,” Klause confessed. “It’s really complicated.”

“Outrage,” directed by Dustin Trabert ’10, is divided into four parts. The first takes place in ancient Greece and revolves around Socrates’ trial; the second, set in the Italian Renaissance, features a miller, who according to Klause “has some interesting ideas about the cosmos”; the third part centers around Bertolt Brecht during the second World War; and the fourth part takes place in a modern academic institution whose hyper-intellectualism is much like Swarthmore’s.

Each part of the play portrays a different episode in intellectual history, but the play is as much about the idea of history as a whole — how history affects people and how people affect history. Heavily academic but also equally comedic­, “Outrage” is about individual versus collective thought and the dangers of single-minded ideologies, as well as about how revolutionary thought is first produced and what happens when that new thought becomes institutionalized. When asked, most of the students involved in “Outrage” will say that the theme linking all four parts together is “intellectual martyrdom.”

“That is, what is the value of being a martyr for your cause?” assistant director Will Hopkins ’11 said. He went on to draw a connection between Swarthmore’s emphasis on activism and social awareness and the themes of Moses’ play. “It’s very relevant now. Here at Swarthmore, we all have our own cause that we get very invested in, and this is a very interesting commentary on that mindset.”

“One of the challenges of the play is to keep it human, to keep it engaging on not just an intellectual, very heady-ideas level,” cast member James Robinson ’10 said. “We have to present characters you will root for and feel for and disagree with.”

According to Robinson, the set will be similarly abstract. “It’s a bunch of ladders of varying heights and that’s what we’re going to be acting on.”

Klause explained that the set design reflected how the play operates on different levels both literally and figuratively.

At the end of the day, however, intellectualism and all, “Outrage” is a play just like any other, a play with hectic rehearsals and not enough coffee and too few people present and not enough time.
“I think what’s most impressive about this show is that we’re doing an LPAC main stage show in a very short amount of time,” cast member Jessie Cannizzaro ’12 said. “We essentially had a month to rehearse and build a set — and especially for the kind of show it is, it spans a lot of different time periods, so it’s really hard to make some kind of cohesiveness out of that in just a month.”

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