“I never imagined my play would be a boon to the sand industry,” said playwright Edward Albee.
Albee was Guilford’s distinguished guest for two days as a speaker in the Bryan Speaker Series. His presence as part of the series has had a large influence on campus, especially in the Theatre Studies Department.
Albee is the author of this year’s fall production of Seascape, which won Albee’s second Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Guilford’s production of the American classic involves many new programs from across the Guilford community.
The set, designed and built by April Soroko’s Set Design class, is “a beautiful and dramatic scene,” Soroko said. “We’re attempting to put the audience in the ocean.”
The entire stage, specially built in Sternberger Auditorium, is covered with sand to create that realistic ocean feel. “I’m just worried that I’ll have sand everywhere, and I mean everywhere, after every performance,” said lead actor Jonathon Vogt.
The stage features two dunes, one rising six feet high and another that reaches nine and a half feet. “There were some design glitches that had to be worked out, but they look great completed,” said first-year Tim Scales, a set design student.
Another new feature of this year’s production comes from Bob Elderkin’s Digital Sound Design class. The students designed the background music, noises, and sounds for this year’s production.
“Bob’s class has engineered all the sounds you will hear,” said Soroko. “It’s a great idea and gets more people in involved.”
The decision to perform Seascape, which will be the first production to feature so much student design, was more difficult than usual.
“Choosing the play this year was hard,” said director and faculty member Lee Soroko. “We had a list of about 12 plays, several by Edward Albee.”
The choice of which play Guilford performs each year is left to the Theatre Studies students, who choose from a wide selection of plays. The committee that picks the play abides by the Quaker tradition of consensus, which requires a unanimous decision.
“It can take a long time because you have to convince everyone that the play has to be done,” Soroko said. They finally decided to supplement Albee’s arrival on campus. “The feeling was that we should do an Albee play – one that wasn’t too obscure and wasn’t too famous,” said Soroko.
Seascape, written in 1975, tells the story of a couple vacationing at the beach who encounter two sea lizards that have come ashore. The two couples overcome fear and suspicion to engage in a lively conversation that ranges from the humorous to the serious.
The play, like many of Albee’s works, combines American drama with the theater of the absurd, a school of theater championed by English playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. The play pairs the unreal (talking sea lizards, for example) with societal problems, such as the fear of those who are different.
Albee pioneered this kind of playwriting. He uses it, he said, to create “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.”
This examination was yet another reason why Guilford chose to perform this play. “Seascape fits with the values of Guilford,” said director Soroko. “The characters achieve understanding through conversation.