New Horizons Program C: From Bagels to Klansmen, This One’s Got It All
Katerina Gawlak : Asst. Features Editor: April 2008

            Florida State’s annual New Horizons New Works Festival has only been around for a few years and has offered different and original plays each year just as the name of the event suggests.  With each play being a completely new piece, and with each opening night being literally the first night that the play has met a real audience, it’s always interesting to see what unfolds for viewers as the lights go up in the Lab Theatre.  The debut of this year’s Program C introduced us to Shannan Johnson’s Stars no Stripes and The Bagelers, written by David Laughlin, and I have never been more pleased to make the acquaintance of two plays.

            Program C opened with The Bagelers, which begins as a comedy about two teenagers brought into a police station for the crime of “bageling” a Cadillac and ends with a series of actions that leaves the audience wondering how it all went so terribly wrong. Directed by Dr. Wendy Clupper, The Bagelers moved seamlessly from a drug-infused comedy with hilarious performances from Mark Register and Natalie Caruncho to a more serious-toned story. Themes about respect and repercussions arose for the audience upon the arrival of Michelle Melvin, cousin to Register’s character, who also happens to be the lawyer brought in to clean up the mess created from the offstage drive-by-bagel attack.

            Many performances in this production gave varying levels of depth and emotion that offered an interesting contrast to

the more simplistic characters like the bageling victim, strongly portrayed by Thomas Towell. For a play that began with a drug trip and a Rubiks Cube and ended with Tasing and imprisonment, the journey the audience was taken on never offered a dull moment.  Through Caruncho’s transformation from a hilariously endearing act as a young girl on her first mind-altering drug to her first life-altering mistake, to Anthony Rey Perez’s depiction of a small-town cop stuck in dispatch limbo, each actor brought a constantly changing array of emotions that gave sincerity and passion to a story that seems frivolous at first glance.

            Stars no Stripes, directed by Anne Towns, revolves around the stories of six high-school students whose pasts have shaped them into the people they are when they meet the audience. Tackling racism from a number of angles, this play had the potential to be more harmful than helpful in performance as each character displayed the chips on their shoulders for all to see through individual monologues.

            What might have been a tedious format to witness, as each monologue ranged from three to five pages in scripting, actually turned out to be wonderfully powerful in action. Towns used the entire space of the Lab Theatre, limited as it may have been, to create motion within the piece that both enhanced the words of the playwright and brought additional imagery to a show that generally does not focus on technical bells and whistles. One such instance of blocking which might have had a powerful impact on the audience occurred during the story of Billy (played by Richie Camp), a young boy who came from a family of KKK members and who was eventually given his own pair of

white sheets. During this monologue, an actor appeared behind the frosted glass which acted as a backdrop for each performance, creating a silhouette that is familiar to most as the uniform of Klan members; while some may have seen this blatant representation of such a taboo subject to be offensive, the tasteful presentation of such a controversial visual heightened the impact of the monologue for many audience members, as witnessed during the talk-backs offered by the program after the show.

            This use of movement and visual pantomime continued through each monologue, consistently giving the audience a new insight to the issues of race and pride. Marissa Rivera’s portrayal of a young Jewish “wannabe” attempting to use humor to assuage the damage of a fairly depressing scenario may have set a misleadingly light-hearted tone for the production, which was soon balanced out by powerful and emotionally driven performances from Al Heartly, Tawatha Valentine, Danielle Alagna, and XiXi Li. With these performances ranging in tone from righteous anger to prideful indignation and everything in between, each aspect of race-relations was covered and well portrayed, ensuring that no form of bigotry was left unmentioned or unexplained.

            Overall, New Horizon’s Program C offered an incredibly well-rounded evening of entertainment, with the perfect balance of humor and sincerity given by each participant. Sometimes it’s scary to see a new play, much less be in one; however, if these performances are to be believed, nobody involved in New Horizons Program C has anything to worry about.