Gannon Knight ArtsLeisure

     A Shakespearean comedy, a German historical drama, a Sam Shepard play and a Broadway musical will all be gracing the Gannon University Schuster Theatre stage for the 2010-2011 season.
     William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” opens the mainstage season in mid-October. A theater favorite, the oft-reinvented and perpetually beautiful “Midsummer” features two sets of lovers and a third-rate acting troupe lost in a forest inhabited by mischievous fairies. Hilarity ensues.
     “It’s a wonderful balance between poetry and imagery, and it’s downright funny,” the Rev. Shawn Clerkin, assistant professor in the theater department, said. “It’s pretty cool that a play that’s 400 years old can be just as funny now as it was then.”
     The second play of the fall 2010 semester, performed right before winter break, is a work by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, which follows the life of Galileo Galilei. Simply called “Galileo,” the play is, in Clerkin’s words, “a perfect Christmas show.”
     “It’ll be a powerful piece about love, redemption, incarnations and the world,” Clerkin said. “Brecht’s style is the epic style, and ‘Galileo’ is just that – the life of Galileo. He was forced to recant his scientific findings because they conflicted with faith. He had strength, though, a personal resolve to continue to say what he knew to be true, in light of the fact that powerful institutions were trying to convince him that he was not right, or that the truth could be dangerous to the common people.”
     The spring semester will open with Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind,” a contemporary American drama about two families connected by marriage and abuse. It’s very violent, Clerkin said, but also very funny – in its own way.
     “It’s very demented, and it takes place in a very broken world,” he said. “It’s very, very skewed; it feels like a real world, but the folks are a little screwed up inside of it.”
     The mainstage season ends with “an old war-horse musical” in “Camelot,” a Tony-award winning show based on T.H. White’s book, “The Once and Future King.” The popular, mainstream show may seem like a work completely antithetical to Schuster’s usual productions, but Clerkin promised to “Gannonize it up.”
     “I’m not interested in Disney princesses with pointed hats,” he said. “That’s been done, so we’re going to do a very Celtic, magical Camelot, to try to get back to T.H. White’s humor and darkness. We want to focus on the forces that fight against any kind of order and fairness in the world. If we can do a Camelot that’s a little less Broadway, the story that’s mythic in its proportion, we’ll do something funky with it.”
     The season features diverse works, Clerkin said, in order to present the theater students and the community with the most artistic and cultural variety – and it is that chance to exercise their acting chops that has students within the department excited.

     “I’m looking forward to ‘Midsummer,’ especially, because I haven’t had a lot of Shakespearean experience, and it’ll give me a chance to broaden my horizons,” said Allison Kessler, a freshman theater/communication arts major. “I’m not familiar with ‘Lie of the Mind,’ but I heard it’ll be a good acting piece for students, so I’m excited for that too.”
     The department will also showcase several lab productions and staged readings, like Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” in February or March.
     “It’s something off the beaten path,” Clerkin said.
     The department will also perform a play written by junior Lisa Lamperski, “The Audience,” for Preview GU.
     Lamperski, a theater/communication arts major, wrote “The Audience” for Clerkin’s playwriting class last spring. The piece is a spin on a typical theater-going experience: instead of the audience watching actors perform on stage, the audience will be watching, well, the audience.
     “It’s opposite – the show is watching the audience, like what people do while watching a play, how they act and react,” Lamperski said. “I’m surprised, shocked, amazed, honored that my play is going to be performed. It’ll be funny, and fun. I can’t wait to see it come to life.”