BY ALEX HO

In print | Published December 3, 2009

As the semester winds down and the practice of misery poker grows more frequent, this year’s Senior Company production, “Melancholy Play,” which runs from Thursday, Dec. 3 to Saturday, Dec. 5 at 8 p.m. in the Frear Ensemble Theater, makes a welcome farce out of the tortured, brooding type in all of us. That tortured brooding type is embodied by the play’s protagonist, Tilly, played by Nell Bang-Jensen ’11, a perpetually melancholy bank employee who upends the lives of the rest of the cast of characters. Her sorrow is interpreted as a thing of beauty and mystery, causing everyone to be instantly smitten with her. The play’s ironic and funny conceit is that, when Tilly finally discovers happiness in the company of a tailor named Frank, played by Chris Klaniecki ’10, the rest of the characters no longer find her beguiling and proceed to wallow in their own melancholy instead.

The drama that ensues ranges from wild metamorphoses to last-minute revelations about characters’ backgrounds, but all of these developments seem natural and par for the course in this production, which is as much about telling its story as it is about creating a distinctly whimsical world that embraces the irrational. Adjusting to this world was mostly the work of co-directors Niccolo Moretti ’10 and Louis Jargow ’10. “Trying to get [the play] to breathe and be one cohesive world that is special … was the biggest challenge for me,” Jargow said.

For Bang-Jensen, the play “is different from most 20th century plays in that it focuses a ess on the psychology of characters.” Tilly’s grand emotional shift from despair to uncontrollable positivity happens on the turn of a dime with little explanation. “It’s definitely been a challenge to stop myself from thinking exactly why this is happening and what happened exactly in these characters’ childhoods to make them so crazy,” Bang-Jensen said. “Getting past that has been really rewarding.”

The play’s trading in of psychological realism for manner-of-fact emotional pronouncements is greatly aided by the prominent role of music in this production. Throughout the play, a piano player, played by Brian Willis ’11, provides musical accompaniment to the characters’ emotional states. Bang-Jensen said, “I can be backstage listening to the music and just get into that mindset.” The characters even unexpectedly break out into song and dance while on stage.
Alum Dan Perelstein ’09, who worked as a sound designer, also arranged and directed the music, in collaboration with Moretti and Jargow’s suggestions. For Perelstein, the play itself carried its own lyrical quality, making his job much easier. “One of the things I love about the piece is the voice of the script … the character of the script is very clear to me,” Perelstein said. “You can’t mix it up. You can’t mistake it for something else.”

That particular voice, which has a strong and undeniable, if invisible, presence throughout the production is that of the playwright herself, Sarah Ruhl. Ruhl is known for her highly poetic approach to her playwriting. In a 2008 profile of Ruhl in The New Yorker, Ruhl described her plays as “three-dimensional poems.” Take any sample of Ruhl’s dialogue and you can see what she means. When Frances, a physicist-turned-hairdresser played by Sam Friedman ’10, tries to explain her connection with Tilly to her uncouth gym teacher husband John, played by McFeely Sam Goodman ’10, she says, “She’s delicate. She could spend an entire afternoon filling a bowl of flowers and putting yellow flowers into the bowl … She’s tired but in a seductive way.”

Ruhl’s elaborate use of metaphor also helped her access Tilly’s extreme emotional states. “The language of the play is really poetic and beautiful,” she said. “We especially looked a lot at, for my character, the images she uses when she’s happy and the images she uses when she’s sad. Visualizing these images and working off the moods they create has been really helpful.”

The play’s quirky brand of logic is also complemented by an impressionistic set, designed by Emma Ferguson ’10, that seems equal parts ballroom and funhouse with its various windows suspended in the air and often starry lighting designed by Dave Todaro. Although the play takes place in Illinois, the set is less suggestive of the American Midwest than of the characters’ great wells of emotion and romantic fantasies.

If the characters’ minds are set on any particular locale, it seems to be most likely an abstract, bygone version of Europe. Tilly often says that she feels like she belongs to a more European temperament, and, indeed, much of the play is taken up by long, cryptic meditations about love and sadness. Lorenzo, played by Eric Holzhauer ’10, even comes from a deliberately obscure European background. Initially an unfeeling psychiatrist whom Tilly goes to see, Lorenzo quickly transforms, in her presence, into an operatic drama queen.

Big emotions aside, “Melancholy Play” is ultimately a farce. “It’s consciously melodramatic,” Friedman said. Klaniecki, for instance, channels Dick Van Dyke in a particularly low moment for Frank and manages to be funny and heartfelt at once. Holzhauer explained how he was able to negotiate between the humor and melodrama. “I didn’t myself think of it as a farce until late in the process,” he said. “I started out approaching the play as very genuinely sad … and as time went on I discovered the humor in it.”

The lighthearted tone was a big part of why this year’s Senior Company chose the play. “I feel like often college people try to do really dark things. This is not that,” Moretti said. “We really liked the silly sadness of it. It was really fun to play.”

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