By Bryona Colyar / The Jambar
It’s time again for Youngstown State University to raise its theater curtains.
This fall, YSU’s University Threatre program will bring four musicals and plays to its multiple stages.
Coming this October, “Arsenic and Old Lace” will take place Oct. 3-5 and Oct. 10-12 in the Ford Theater of Bliss Hall, located on the first floor.
Written by Joseph Kesselring, this brooding yet comedic play follows drama critic Mortimer Brewster, who discovers that his aunts have poisoned lonely men as a kind gesture.
To go along with the plot, the set team took on the task of building a larger-scale set to encapsulate the eerie dramedy. The creative team created a two-story, victorian-style set with a functional staircase and multiple entryways.
Gunnar Carwile, technical director for University Theatre and the Dana School of Music, said the challenge of bringing the two-story set to life makes this play and the rest of the season more worthwhile for staff and students.
Carwile said the set is YSU’s most ambitious project in the last ten years.
“It’s a very large scale. It’s a lot of learning curves for not only myself — because it’s my first time building a two-story set — but a learning curve for a lot of different actors in this space because they have never worked on a set like this,” Carwile said.
To end the fall semester, the theatre will dramatize the dramas of high school in “Be More Chill.” “Be More Chill” is a musical based on author Ned Vizzini’s novel of the same name.
The musical tells the story of an outcast named Jeremy who takes a pill containing a supercomputer, SQUIP, to become more popular and fit in. The play follows the epic highs and lows of identity and technology in high school.
The theatre department will put on the act Nov. 14-16 and Nov. 21-23 in the Spotlight Theater on the first floor of Bliss Hall.
Two more plays will blossom at the Cliffe College in the spring, as the casts of “Episode 26” and “Kiss Me, Kate” take center stage.
“Episode 26,” running Feb. 13-15 and Feb. 20-22, will showcase a parodic homage to sci-fi serials to kick off the spring semester in Spotlight Theater.
The spring-semester season will then conclude with the musical, “Kiss Me, Kate.” The play is centered around English playwright and poet William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”
The play will be available for one weekend only from April 16-19 at Ford Theater.
