Theatre ARTICLES

S. M. Mears' concept for directing Private Lives - May 1996

This play is not about ideas or statements. It's about moods and behavior. Coward used his experience in musical review of the '20's to construct a play with continual mood shifts determined by the behavior of the characters. There is a strong sense of symmetry. In the first and third acts the couples take turns acting out almost identical scenes. Frivolity reigns. Amanda and Elyot are 'performers' who treat serious things frivolously and frivolous things seriously. Victor and Sibyl represent the 'norm' to which the other two shun. This play looks at sex roles by showing the 'norm' vs. Amanda and Elyot - who are essentially equals. Coward has created a world for his characters that is separate and unique from 'reality.' Even though the plot is thin, there is tremendous energy being produced from the dialogue, physical actions, and character relations. The dialogue is constructed like the lyrics of a song - dramatically rhythmical. The physical actions must be as clear, precise, and controlled as a tap dance. It has elements of farce, comedy of manners, and camp, but it does not fully encompass any one of them.


'Private Lives' is a special production
- The Collegian review by Lori Crislip; Oct. 7, 1996

A divorced couple, now remarried to different people meet again while honeymooning with their new spouses. They fight, they yell, they bicker, and they fall in love again. The couple runs away to Paris, leaving their new spouses behind.

What begins as a soap opera-like storyline turns into a wonderful play that could rival any love story, comedy, or boxing match.

The divorced couple, Elyot and Amanda, are in Paris basking in the happiness of their reunion. However, in the midst of their lovey-doviness, they bicker, argue and pout as they had when they were married.

As Elyot and Amanda's anger swells, their new spouses, Sibyl and Victor, re-enter their lives. This is when things get interesting - as if they weren't already!

At the end of the play, Elyot, Amana, Sibyl, and Victor all sit down to drink coffee and attempt to be civil toward one another. This scene was my personal favorite. The attempt fails miserably; Sibyl and Victor yell at each other as Elyot and Amanda watch in amusement.

"Private Lives" and its performers were excellent. Justin Tharp (Elyot) and Megan Oatis (Amanda) were especially consistent during the silent scenes. Their facial expressions entertained the entire audience even though neither said one word.

Tharp showed excellent mastery of flippancy. In many ways he reminds me of a '30's actor, with his combination of sarcasm and charm. Megan Oatis showed amazing grace on stage. She was excellent at switching from one emotion to another effortlessly.

Karen Sternberg (Sibyl) and Matthew Gretzinger (Victor) made their smaller roles much larger and more memorable with comedic flair and stage presence. Their portrayals of uptight characters helped set off the emotional, flamboyant Elyot and Amanda.

Beth Kirkhope, who played Louise, the French housekeeper, used her witty expressions and gestures to escalate her on-stage presence without speaking a work of English. I only wish Louise had had a larger role in the play.

However, the true star and heroine of "Private Lives" was student director Sarah Mears. Mears, a senior in University College, dedicated her great talent and drive to make the play a success. Her hard work, combined with the actors' wonderful talents, made "Private Lives" very special.


The Rep dances brilliantly
- The Blade review by Tom Gearhart; Nov. 1994

Get yourself over to the Toledo Repertoire Theater downtown during the current run of Brian Friel's Irish drama, Dancing at Lughnasa.

You're liable to encounter more than a supremely talented company of actors treading the boards. There are Druids and pagan spirits afoot within those old walls, and they stir something so primeval that words alone can't describe the strange feelings they evoke. It takes something more basic than words. It takes dancing.

The Tony Award-winning play, ostensibly a domestic drama about five Irish sisters living out their drab, impoverished lives in the village of Ballybeg, throbs with ancient rhythms and dark ceremony. Surely at play's end, there were other theatergoers like me who felt they had been knocked dumbstruck by the sheer emotional force of Lughnasa.

Its impact is testimony to the brilliance of Friel's writing, but it also owes much to the astonishing performances of the ensemble cast. Directed with great delicacy by Mark Standriff, the five women and tree men, their mesmerizing Irish voices illuminating the stage, capture not only the poignancy, humor, and angst of the characters, but the mysticism and ancestral mystery that course beneath the surface.

These unseen forces break to light most dramatically in a scene where the women, hampered all their lives by custom and religious convention, join in a spontaneous dance of frenzy during Lughnasa (pronounced LOO-nuh-suh), an Irish harvest festival in honor of the Celtic god Lugh. They seem possessed; each of them twitches and shrieks in a fevered private communion as Irish fiddle music plays, giving release to their buried frustrations and leaving the audience numb with wonder.

Friel's Mundy family comprises five wan, pale women in woolens and tattered calico. There is Kate (Vickie O'Connor Jackson), the eldest, a prim woman with a stern Catholic conscience; Maggie (Shirley Williams), the funny one; thick-witted Rose (Sarah M. Mears); Agnes (Tahree Lane), quiet and bitter; and Chris (Sally Tay Howe), a romantic dreamer.

The story - more a loose-knit collection of incidents - is narrated by Michael (Charles E.H. Faulkner), Chris's "love child," who was born out of wedlock. Now grown, he looks back to the year 1936 when he was 7 and his mother shared a house with her sisters, pooling their meager resources. Michael also appears as a boy in the women's imagination.

That was the year that the sisters' uncle [brother, actually], Father Jack (Jim Rudes), a missionary priest, came home after 25 years in a leper colony in Uganda. It was also the year that Michael's itinerant father, Gerry Evans (Byron Law), a real charmer with a deep secret, came waltzing home for two brief visits and once again swept his mother off her feet.

The arrival of a battery-operated "marconi" radio amounts to big news in the Mundy household; never mind that it doesn't work most of the time. Forbidden by Kate to go into the village for Lughnasa, they listen to music - from Irish jigs to Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" - and remain stuck in their workaday routine.

Kate teaches school and worries about poor Rose who, with Agnes, makes hand-knit gloves for a local factory. Chris looks after the house and dreams of a life with Gerry and Michael, and Maggie cooks and cracks jokes.

Each of the characters is so beautifully brought to life that singling out any one of the actors would do the rest of the ensemble a terrible injustice.

Laughter peals through the house, as well as the usual quarreling and back-and-forth of siblings, but there is nothing faintly sentimental or uplifting about this memory play. Narrator Michael is there to remind us what awaits these women - Agnes and Rose's tragically hard turn of fate is just one example.

In an ineffably sad scene, Maggie and Kate watch Chris dance to Big Band music in the garden with Gerry, and the looks on their faces reflect both wistfulness and despair. Like Chekhov's Three Sisters, these Irish women dream of better things while knowing full well there is no escape from their dead-end reality.

But always in the distance is a bewitching chant or rhythm calling the Mundys to dance - "Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement," Friel writes. "As if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness."

Outside at intermission, I overheard one theatergoer saying that the play "has no right to be so meandering, so unstructured. The more I see it, the less I like it." He's wrong, of course: Friel's genius lies precisely in his craftsmanship, particularly in the way he overthrows conventional structure in favor of a "meandering" story line. He leaves holes and gaps that Welsh poet Dylan Thomas once said were necessary "so that something that is not in the work can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in."

Go see Dancing at Lughnasa ... And expect magic.


Jean Paul Sartre's 'No Exit' to Fuel a UT theatre department winter production
William Smith directs the Sartre's story of three hell-bent thespians
- The Collegian article by Max Lambdin; Feb 3, 1994

The weather on the UT campus may be freezing, but due to the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance's presentation of "No Exit," three thespians are feeling some extreme heat.

The Studio Theatre provides the setting for the one-act play, which consists of only a hotel room. This structure provides a literal hell for its occupants who are trapped within.

The cast matches the set in size, containing only three characters: Quarie Hussain (Garcin), Sarah Mears (Inez) and Kate Szyperski (Estelle). They bring to life Sartre's unfortunate individuals who spend eternal damnation together.

Mears expressed her appreciation of having a condensed cast. "I like it a lot," she said. "You get very personal and intimate." Although Mears is enjoying the experience, she finds it very tiring. "With this play, you're on stage the entire time," she said. "It's literally exhausting."

One man and two women, each with conflicting needs, are locked away and kept from their separate lives on earth. Each character is dead and existing post-mortem. Their behavioral desires never change in this realm because of the uncomprehendable consistency of eternity.

Seduction and warped philosophical views create the dialogue and situations for each member of the human triangle, who manipulate and torture one another throughout the hour-long production.

"We are there to torment each other..." Mears said, about the purpose of each character in the play.

Interaction with the audience provides a challenge for the actors with such a complex dialogue. "There is very little action to play off of. Our goal is to make it visually interesting," Mears said.

Mears is a senior in performance who first appeared on the UT stage in the fall student production of "Tartuffe."


Life in HELL
Director William Smith challenges audiences with latest UT production
- Spectrum article by Robert Holman; Feb 2, 1994

The audience of a theatrical production too often expects to be entertained by flashy costumes, humorous dialogue and dramatic presentation. Although the UT Department of Theatre, Film and Dance's production of No Exit will be entertaining, "glitz" will not be the vehicle.

The audiences of No Exit will be required to think to appreciate the entertainment value of the production. The messages and overtones of the writing are complex and open a window into our own psyches. Director William Smith explains, "The play is a think piece, you have to sit there as an audience and work."

Smith said No Exit is the most famous of the existential plays. He explained existentialism as the philosophy of all people being responsible for their own actions. Existentialism reached its height of popularity in the United States in the 1950's.

The play is literally set in Hell. The story is nearly completely told through the dialogue of the characters, who have all recently died and are now paying for their actions in life by being trapped together in eternal damnation. The characters' own private hell is very different from the fire and brimstone that may come to mind. The three principle characters are enclosed in a relatively normal room - with no exit - to abstractly torture each other for eternity.

This is where the thinking begins. How can being stuck in a room with someone be equivalent to Hell? Is everyday life really this horrible? Can anyone we meet on the street be our forever torturer? How can we ease the hell of everyday life for the people around us? In what ways do we pay for our actions everyday?

With just one week until dress rehearsal, practices have taken a circus flair as the director and cast try to complete a day's work in two and a half hours. At the beginning of rehearsal, Director Smith and the Sophomore Theater Major and Stage Manager Andy Neary scan-listen to several CDs being considered for opening music.

First year transfer student and Senior Theater Major Sarah Mears (Inez) sits on-stage memorizing lines while she fields intrusive questions with a hand-held tape recorder shoved in her face. Everyone puts in their opinion on the perfect sounds for Hell. Meanwhile, Smith is also acting as Director of Photography as he arranges his cast for the perfect promotional shot between disc changes.

Now it is only 10 minutes into rehearsal and the cast and crew are ready for the important work. Smith calls his three main characters to the stage with simply, "Pick up where we let off last night." This is where the professionalism and intensity begin.

UT Graduate Kate Szyperski (Estelle), Senior Theater Major Qarie Hussain (Garcin) and Sarah Mears quickly transform into each other's torturers and pick-up in the middle of the show. Looking inside themselves, each cast member seems to find the character they are portraying. Smith explains, "I like to help the actor experience the character within the context of their own lives." The cast stays in character even when they need to call for a line from Andy Neary.

Smith has a very clear vision of the blocking and spacing he wants. He seems to be looking for transitions from symmetry to asymmetry in the characters' positions to symbolize the different levels of intensity and conflict in the dialogue.

The action migrates from Garcin banging and pleading in the back corner like an unsatisfied child to hands-on-showered-whispers from Inez in a few minutes. Director Smith is determined to have many levels of emotion shown on stage. He calls for his actors to make sure the portrayals correspond with proper levels of anger. At one point he calls for Mears to out-do the rage shown by Hussain and later talks about emphasis being put on certain words to carry the intensity, but not show too much passion.

The cast had only a month between auditions and opening night to put the show together. Smith attributes the speed of preparation to the experience and skill of his three main characters and to the relatively short 90-minute length of the play.

...Sarah Mears has transferred from BGSU Firelands Campus in Huron to finish out her last year in theater studies at UT. She was involved in numerous productions at Firelands and was Madame Pernelle in the UT Fall '93 production of Tartuffe.


Old West End student takes second place in
UT-Rep Midwestern Playwright's Festival
- Toledo Herald article by David Matile; Sept. 21, 1994

Months of work at her mother's manual typewriter paid off for University of Toledo senior Sarah Mears, as she gave form to a 10-year-old idea and took second place in the Midwestern Playwrights Festival.

The festival, sponsored by UT's Department of Theatre, Film and Dance and the Toledo Repertoire Theatre, is the first of what organizers hope will become an annual event. Scripts were submitted by 95 playwrights living in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois and were reviewed by a committee of theater professionals from UT and the Rep.

The committee conducted "blind" reviews (the reviewers didn't know who authored the plays) that examined unpublished two-act plays which had not been professionally produced, and "illuminated the Midwestern experience."

"A Portrait" is the first play written by the 24-year-old Old West End resident, and she says she is surprised to have done so well.

According to Mears, "A Portrait" is primarily about relationships. In the play, Diane, an artist, reluctantly agrees to paint a portrait of her ex-lover Peter's wife, Olivia. The twist is that Olivia is dying, and Peter has decided not to tell her.

If the plot sounds unrealistic and like something from a soap opera, it's not. Mears got her inspiration from actor Rex Harrison's autobiography, which she read while in high school in Sandusky.

She read other works to more fully understand the situation between Harrison and his dying wife, actress Kay Kendall. "It intrigued me because it was so unusual," Mears says of Harrison's decision not to tell Kendall she is dying. "There were a lot of questions and speculation about the situation."

"There's no explanation as to why he did this in the first place, and there's this question as to whether she really did not know." Mears says she incorporated this sense of not knowing into "A Portrait."

"All these questions puzzled me, and I wanted to explore that in different ways. What I ended up doing was creating a third party [Diane] and focusing more on how the situation affects her," Mears says. "I didn't really deal a whole lot with the central situation." Mears says this gives "A Portrait" an airy, elevated and somewhat surreal feeling. Her play has elements of both tragedy and comedy and "it could be played up as melodramatic, but," she laughs, "I hope it won't be."

The question of whether Olivia knows she is dying seems to bother audiences more than it does Mears. "A lot of the criticism about my play is that people want to know the answers." Mears said that after the work-shop reading at the Rep, people came to her asking if Olivia knew, and what it was that she has. "I don't know," she told them. "That's for you to decide."

The intent, Mears said, was "to have the audience experience the situation and not have them just sit there and have everything given to them on a platter." Mears said the current dramatic style, in which everything is neatly wrapped up at the end of the movie or play, leaves no room for imagination.

Deciding on the particulars of Olivia's condition, and giving too many answers Mears said, would have ruined the play. "That's not what I was writing. That's not why I was writing it." Her original goal was to make her audience think, but "what I realized in getting responses from audiences was, it wasn't so much a thinking process as a feeling process. They were actually feeling something. That was the focus to them." Mears says she hadn't thought of getting that sort of reaction. "I was totally blown away when those first reactions started bombarding me. It made me realize that this is a 'feel' piece."

"A Portrait" had its genesis in a playwriting course Mears took last year. She says at first the work was vague and she was reluctant to make conclusions, but classmates told her it was too confusing. "Little by little I kept adding things here and there to make it clearer," Mears says. "But always keeping in mind not to give too much."

It was a challenge not to answer all of the questions she raised, but "what kept me from answering the questions was the simple fact that I couldn't make up my own mind."

Having constant feedback from the rest of the class was helpful, though, "I sort of felt bad because I was the only one who wasn't 'pumping out' the plays. A lot of my classmates were writing two or three plays and being very creative and experimental. And I just kept plugging away at this one," she laughs.

"Much of the dialog," Mears says, was inspired by old movie and sophisticated comedy plays "where you've got the snappy dialog, the subtle humor."

Mears plans to graduate from UT next fall, and says she wants to work more in theater, and some day move on to film directing. "Film has been a major part of my life, and I've always wanted to make films," she says, and "A Portrait" could be her first movie.

"That's one of my future projects," Mears says. "Once I'm distanced from it for a while, I'll dig it out again and probably make a screenplay out of it." Except for some possible rewrites for the Rep, Mears says she is finished with the project that has taken the better part of a year.

"My job is done, now it's their baby - they have to raise it."


Winning plays to be staged at Toledo Rep
Play written by UT student featured
- The Collegian article by Arin Singer; April 27, 1995

The winners of last year's Playwright's Festival competition have finally found their place in the limelight as their winning plays are to be performed at the Toledo Repertoire Theater.

"Cairo," written by Arthur Melville Pearson and "A Portrait," written by Sarah M. Mears, received first and second place, respectively in the 1994 festival.

Mears, a senior in theater, was quite surprised at her second-place finish. "It's really unbelievable. Nobody gets their first play produced within a year of its writing," she said.

"A Portrait" is the story of Diane, an artist, who agrees to paint her ex-lover's wife's portrait. The wife, Olivia, is dying which causes the whole plot to come about.

"Mainly the focus is about relationships of the four people. Basically, [it's] a drama in the generic sense. It has comical events," Mears said.

The characters must face the inner conflict of completing the portrait, which becomes the artist's obsession that finally takes over her life. A key element is the fact that the wife does not know she is dying. Only the husband and the artist know this.

The play is not based on a true story, but is inspired by the death of Kay Kendall, a 1950's actress who died at age 32. Kendall's husband, Rex Harrison, knew she was dying, but did not tell her.

Mears has been a fan of Kendall and wanted to write something about her, which gave her the inspiration to write "A Portrait" ... which is set in a present-day New York studio apartment.

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