Break a leg

Getting college-age actors to play characters from past eras is often seen as a technical enterprise: Put the actors in hoopskirts or miniskirts so the audience will know the setting is 1870 or 1970. But the task is as much an emotional one as a technical one. A director must help the actors to evoke the spirit and feeling of the proper period so they act as well as look their parts. The director of one of the three summer productions of the Dartmouth Players spoke recently about this facet of college drama.

Peter Phillips '71 returned to Hanover for the summer to direct Loose Ends, a recent off-Broadway hit by Michael Weller. The play was described in the Hopkins Center's summer promotional pieces as "the story of a relationship and the decade it traversed . . . love and marriage, separation and divorce in the seventies." The characters in Loose Ends are "not Jerry Rubins and Bernadette Devlins by any means," Phillips noted. But the basically boy-meets-girl plot line of the play is greatly colored by the fact that the "boy" had just gotten out of the Peace Corps in the first scene, that the "girl" confronts the dilemma of careerversus-family as the play progresses, and that their friends include New Hampshire hippies who end up on Wall Street and religious mystics who end up in the bourgeoisie. The play's action spans the seventies: in 1970, the couple meets on a beach in Bali; in 1971 he brings her to New Hampshire to meet some counterculture friends; in 1973 they live together, then marry, in Boston; by 1977 they're living in an apartment on Central Park West in New York, and their marriage is falling apart; in 1978 they break up when he learns that she had had an abortion some time earlier; and, in the last scene, in 1979, they have a post-divorce reconciliation of sorts in a cabin in New Hampshire.

Phillips suggested that young actors may have a more difficult time with a play set in the relatively recent past. The further back in time a setting is, the more likely it is that the era's sociological and political climate will be generally understood (and thus common knowledge among the actors) and the less likely it is that the period will be recalled in detail by large numbers of people (and thus very familiar to many audience members). For example, he noted that the summer company "seemed to feel more comfortable with Main Line Philadelphia in the thirties or with a sleazy Paris hotel in the 1890s [in the summer's two other productions, The Philadelphia Story and Hotel Paradiso] than with New Hampshire in 1971 [in Loose Ends]."

Phillips himself is of the same era as the characters in Loose Ends, his college years and young adulthood having been spent in the tumultuous seventies. He sees the current college generation as quite different. "They do not have the strong drive for social conscience," he said. Consequently, he felt, the cast had some difficulty "in grasping the very point of interest of the play itself: what happened to those of us whose lives were socially and politically galvanized during those times. Is there something we've lost or was it simply an infatuation in the first place?"

For example, Phillips explained that when he mentioned the seventies catchphrase "Never trust anyone over 30" to the cast, "they started at me blankly." He said some had heard the phrase, though some hadn't, but that all "criticized its extremity. . . . They had no idea of the extent to which it was 'us' and 'them,' " he said of the seventies' generation gap.

Phillips was impelled to bring LooseEnds to the Dartmouth stage for personal reasons very connected with the theme of the play. "This is the summer in my life when I'm thinking these thoughts," he explained. "I haven't quite resolved in my own mind some of thege things yet," he said, referring to the political and sociological turmoil of the seventies.

The actors' approach to the play seems to have been just as colored by their own personal perceptions of the era. One cast member said, according to Phillips, that she felt "the people of that time were selfish . . . they seemed to feel they had permission not to be tolerant . . . they were passionate about themselves, not about other people, but under the mask of caring about other people."

Phillips noted that while he may "be generalizing," he feels that the seventies may be a period "more challenging to capture than most" at least currently, for he also said, "I wish we were further away, to understand better." Of whether it was just as hard for collegeage actors to do a production set during the forties in 1954, he said, "I guess the right answer to that is that it must have been very similar . . . it's the nature of the beast that when you're close to something it's hard to see it."

Though "the bulk of the rehearsal time was spent in a conventional rehearsal situation," Phillips said that he took opportunities as they arose to talk with the cast about the sociological and political climate of the seventies, drawing from his own experiences. "I'd tell them about the Parkhurst takeover, about Janis Joplin, about the counterculture, " he explained.

Theatrical production clearly involves many technical aspects, such as lighting, costumes, sets, and blocking. But Phillips's approach to his summer directing stint illustrates the importance, too, of "loose ends" such as establishing the right sociological and political atmosphere.