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Show 4 - CaMTQ)M The Forum March 21, 2000 By Gia Thronsden Staff Writer Students if you haven't seen the latest Westminster play yet, clear your calendars or con your way out of prior commitments to see. Wait Until Dark March 5 in the Jewett Center for the Performing Arts. Directed by Dr. Michael Vought, this play by Frederick Knott, is sure g to keep audiences wondering what will happen next and their prediction skills once they find out that the entire play is unpredictable and suspenseful. Frederick Knotts writes a masterfully thrilling plot, that keeps everyone on their toes and guessing what will happen throughout the whole play. The characters are well defined, and the actors are able to pull off convincingly the emotions, of being forced into circumstances that are beyond their control. Set in an apartment that turns to a photo lab with one flip of a switch, the play takes place over two days in New York. Three try blind a is in hidden filled that doll a to heroin obtain desperately woman's apartment. A set of lies begins a plot to enter the apartment and con the woman into giving up the doll no matter what it takes. Dishonesty, trickery and even murder are the tools these men use to achieve their goal. Just as things seem at their worst, the blind woman formulates her own scheme to foil the plot. All actors fit into tneir roles beautifully, even friends of the actors might wonder who is actually on stage when they see morally upstanding students become heartless criminals and a sighted student become blind. Senior Patrick Kibbie plays Harry Roat, a powerfully mysterious character, walking around the scene with confidence and authority. The way Mr. Roat pushes characters Sgt. Carlino (John Welsh) and Mike Talman (Don Farmer) around the stage with mere words and instructions 23-2- second-guessin- con-artis- ts con-artis- ts' is nothing less than fabulous. Welsh and Farmer are miraculously transformed into characters within characters as they pretend to be a policeman and a friend of the blind woman's husband. Both turn the woman's life upside down by spinning stories, and making up excuses, the two weasel their way into the woman's life to obtain the doll. Senior Greta Schomburg's as Suzy Hendrix plays a somewhat helpless blind woman but soon learns to use her disability to an advantage. Schomburg's character was disadvantaged with the loss of her sight, but Schomburg, herself, was at no disadvantage plaving the part. In the end, Schomburg's character's turns her single downfall becomes her savior. As Gloria, Quinn Kiger brings a childlike innocence and enthusiasm to the stage and to the aid of Suzy Hendrix. Prancing giddily around the set, Kiger projects the willingness and concern of a caring child to life as she assists Hendrix with her own plot to keep what she thinks are the police off her husband's tail. Although Sam Hendrix (Wil McKean) is only on stage for one scene with his wife Suzy, his presence lingers throughout the play as Roat, Talman, and Carlmo use his association with the doll to further their purposes, by convincing his wife that he has been leading a life that she knows absolutely nothing about. Carefully planned elaborate details about Mr. Hendrix's life, contrived n make him one of the main characters even though he is by the only on stage a short time. Once the damage of Roat and the others has been done, and the stage is filled with complete darkness and silence, policeman Tyler Evans and Troy Ketterling, bust through the door shining flashlights on a serious crime. The performance of Evans and Ketterling brings an intensifying and heart stopping play to calm yet unsettling close. As the campus wide sent by Vought said, "if you like mystery and suspense, this show is for you," however, "it's very entertaining but it's not for the fainthearted." So quit taking other students' words for it and just go see it! Make sure you are sitting next to an understanding person and that you have at least one armrest to grab onto because Wait Until Dark doesn't end when the lights go out. nine-year-o- ld con-me- e-m- ail |