Department of
Theater, Film, and Media Studies

Like many of Noel Coward's comedies of manners set among the English bourgeoisie and written between the two world wars--like Fallen Angels, Private Lives, and Design for Living--Hay Fever epitomizes the wit and sophistication of the Coward play. Inspired by a weekend he spent at the house of actress Laurette Taylor and her playwright-husband, Hartley Manners, as well as by a slew of other larger-than-life personalities of Coward's acquaintance, Coward wrote Hay Fever in just three days, to both critical and audience acclaim. It's about a family whose eccentricities and theatrical excesses torment a group of unsuspecting weekend guests.

Hay Fever is set in the Hall of the Bliss family home, where we meet Judith, a recently retired stage actress; David, her would-be novelist husband; and Sorel and Simon, their two equally unconventional children. The Blisses blissfully live in a world where fiction easily substitutes for reality, and where their unfortunate weekend guests--a proper diplomat, a shy flapper, an athletic boxer, and a fashionable sophisticate--are repeatedly thrown into melodramatic scenes wherein the Blisses over-emote and, with characteristic theatrical flourish, over-react to situations that do not really exist. The resulting comedic chaos ends only when the tortured visitors tip-toe out the door one-by-one, with our unsuspecting hosts none the wiser.

Auditions: Auditions are open to all students as well as members of the local community and will take place on Wednesday, September 1, beginning at 6:00 p.m. in the Bruce Davis Theater, MH. Please prepare a 1-2 minute contemporary monologue of your own choosing. Callbacks will be held on Thursday, September 2, time TBA. Performance dates are October 14-17 and 21-24. For further information about the play or procedures for auditions, contact the director, Michael Ellis-Tolaydo, at mellistolaydo@smcm.edu.  

Reservations: To reserve tickets for Hay Fever, contact the Theater Box Office at 240-895-4243 (ext. 4243), or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu. Ticket prices are $4 for students, faculty, SMCM staff, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6 general admission. Patrons must pick up their reserved tickets at the Box Office window by 7:50 p.m. for evening performances and by 1:50 p.m. for matinee performances; otherwise, unclaimed tickets will be released for sale.

Both hilarious antidote and fitting complement to the verbal virtuosity of Noel Coward's Hay Fever, Eugene Ionesco's self-described "anti-play," or "comedy of comedies," sets out to show how human discourse devolves into platitudinous inanity and triviality; language, or more accurately, its non-sense, savagely betrays the banality and ferocity of our living, to both laugh-out-loud and mock-tragic consequence. And this in 1950, when the play was written!

Ionesco's earliest works, and, arguably, his most innovative, were one-act "nonsense" plays, including The Bald Soprano (a.k.a. La Cantatrice chauve), The Lesson, The Chairs, and Jack, or The Submission, all written between 1950 and 1955. These so-called "absurdist" plays, which Ionesco dubbed "anti-plays," express postmodern feelings of alienation and the impossibility and futility of communication.

For our main characters in The Bald Soprano -- the middle-aged English couple Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their young English guests, Mr. and Mrs. Martin -- everything wreaks of English: from the determinedly "middle-class English interior," replete with "English armchairs" and an "English fireplace," to the not-so-proper and overworked Mary, the English maid, whose mock-revolt sets the British working class against the moneyed leisure class. Into their midst arrives the inimitable Fire Chief, who stops by on his way to douse a fire, to tell a few funny stories. After an evening of chit-chat, small-talk, more chit-chat and more small-talk, comings-and-goings that are more comings-than-goings, declarations of love and sighs at separations, all the while the English clock strikes 17 or 20 or more English strokes -- you get the picture! -- the Smith and Martin get-together careens toward uncomprehending disaster. How does the evening end? It's darkly comic, or comically dark. (And that's not because it's performed in blackout.)

Auditions: Auditions are open to all students as well as members of the local community and will (currently) take place on Monday, October 18, 7:30-10:00 p.m. in the Bruce Davis Theater, MH. Please prepare a 1-2 minute comic monologue of your own choosing. Callbacks will be held on Tuesday, October 19, beginning at 7:00 p.m. Performance dates are December 8-12. For further information about the play or procedures for auditions, contact the director, Mark A. Rhoda, at marhoda@smcm.edu.

Reservations: To reserve tickets for The Bald Soprano, contact the Theater Box Office at 240-895-4243 (ext. 4243), or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu. Ticket prices are $4 for students, faculty, SMCM staff, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6 general admission. Patrons must pick up their reserved tickets at the Box Office window by 7:50 p.m. for evening performances and by 1:50 p.m. for matinee performances; otherwise, unclaimed tickets will be released for sale.

With the participation of cutout animator and collagist Lewis Klahr (California Institute of the Arts), computer animator and video installation artist James Duesing (Carnegie Mellon University), and animator Karen Aqua, whose short films have screened in Croatia, Japan, and France and on the iconic children's television program, Sesame Street, TFMS's Fourth Annual Film Series will offer a range in forms of alternative animation and collage.

Please refer back periodically for updates about guest participation.

The following screening schedule is subject to change. All screenings take place in Cole Cinema, Campus Center, on the SMCM campus, and are free and open to the public.

Monday, February 14, 2011, 8:15 p.m., Karen Aqua
Monday, February 21, 2011, 8:15 p.m., James Duesing
Monday, February 28, 2011, 8:15 p.m., Lewis Klahr

The Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies would like to thank the following for its generous support of the Fourth Annual TFMS Film Series: Lecture and Fine Arts of St. Mary's College of Maryland.

"Mother Hicks is a witch they say." So begins Mother Hicks, Suzan Zeder's award-winning play written for young audiences. Using poetry and sign language as well as dramatic action to tell its story, Mother Hicks is based on oral histories gathered in the rural Midwest during the Great Depression and deals very movingly with issues of discrimination, disability, exclusion, and the longing to belong. Its central characters are three outsiders: a young 13 year-old orphan girl (Girl), a young deaf man (Tuc), and a woman in her forties (the titular Mother Hicks) who, because she is a recluse and tends to injured animals, is suspected by ignorant townsfolk of being a witch. These three lonely but loving people find and support each other, creating in the process a positive sense of community. The playwright, Zeder, is considered America's leading writer of stage works for young audiences.

Auditions: Auditions are open to all students as well as members of the local community. Dates and times for auditions have not yet been established. Please check back periodically for updates. Performance dates are March 30-April 3, and may additionally involve touring to local elementary schools and high schools. For further information about the play or auditions, contact the director, Holly A. Blumner, at hablumner@smcm.edu.

Reservations: To reserve tickets for Mother Hicks, contact the Theater Box Office at 240-895-4243 (ext. 4243), or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu. Ticket prices are $4 for students, faculty, SMCM staff, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6 general admission. Patrons must pick up their reserved tickets at the Box Office window by 7:50 p.m. for evening performances and by 1:50 p.m. for matinee performances; otherwise, unclaimed tickets will be released for sale.