BY JOAN KIM

In print | November 1, 2007

This weekend, the Drama Board will produce Neil LaBute’s seductive drama “The Shape of Things” in Olde Club. The piece, directed by Sean Nesselrode ’09, Tally Sharma ’09 and Melanie Spaulding ’09, follows the transformation of college student Adam (Daniel Putnam ’08) as he ventures into the definitions of art and love.

Awkward and insecure, Adam meets and forms a relationship with a confident, commanding art student, Evelyn (Jessie Bear ‘09), who is demanding of Adam and asks him to make many changes to himself. He “undergoes a Frankenstein-esque transformation” Sharma said. His engaged friends, Phillip (Dustin Trabert ’10) and Jenny (Isa St. Clair ’11), react to Adam’s changes as he morphs under Evelyn’s influence. The play “touches on weighty issues such as love and art in a mundane setting,” Nesselrode said. It explores “the blurry divide between cruelty and aesthetics,” Co-director Spaulding added. The allusion to Adam and Eve may be a bit stretched, but that is for audiences to determine.

The entire cast represents students of all class years and different levels of experience. However, the chemistry between the directors and actors bodes well for the production of the play.

Adam is “probably like a lot of Swarthmore students – awkward, sweet-spirited and not particularly world experienced,” Nesselrode said. According to Nesselrode, Putnam has to play “in a sense, two characters – the pre-Evelyn Adam and the post-Evelyn Adam. The biggest challenge was to convey that transformation convincingly.”

Evelyn, on the other hand, is “appealing in a dark and controllable type of way,” Bear said. “There’s always a dark draw to a character that is in charge.” Bear based her interpretation of Evelyn off of someone she had met in the past. One of the difficulties is that the character of Evelyn is “such an opposite of the person that I am,” Bear said. But, she said, she is accustomed to playing different types characters; her varied past roles are a testament to that.

Nesselrode, Sharma and Spaulding first discovered this play when Spaulding saw the play at her high school. She gave the script to Sharma to read, and Sharma then sent it to Nesselrode. Sharma and Spaulding had worked together previously in the Night of Scenes production.

The play is especially appealing because of the college setting and the ease with which the actors and the audience can relate to the characters’ situations. According to Bear, LaBute’s skillfully written dialogue reflected how college students actually speak. St. Clair found that “the text gave a lot of room for interpretation” and since her character was not “set in stone,” she had the freedom and flexibility to work around what the other actors brought to the stage.

“The Shape of Things” will be showing in Olde Club this Friday, Nov. 2 at 7 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 3 at 3 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m.

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