Middletown Review
By Lola Mendeloff
This semester’s main stage production, Middletown, asks a lot of its’ audience. It questions the existence of human beings, asks what we want out of life, wonders whether life is worth living and demands of us what it means to be exist in the natural world. The play, written by Will Eno and directed by our own Mark Seamon, is set in a purposefully non-descript little town (overly reminiscent of Granville in some ways) and follows several individuals through their life and daily struggles. The fairly large cast contains a variety of actors, some new to the stage and some very familiar to it. The play acknowledges the fear of death and purpose that tend to be always just on the edge of the subconscious, playing this out in some characters more clearly than others. One character (played by senior Chris Morriss) struggles with social anxiety and says, “Someone must have scared his mother a lot before he was born”; another character (played by senior Person Handley) often turns his gaze to the audience and discusses our place in the big, wide universe. At several points, the audience is addressed directly (known as ‘breaking the fourth wall’) by actors performing monologues, and in one meta-theatrical scene, a group of people sits in theater seats as though at the intermission of Middletown, discussing the characters and their stories, trying to comprehend the meaning of the play just as we the audience is trying to do.
The playwright has used the nuances of language to show the nuances of human personalities and their interactions with each other—particularly between the main characters Mary Swanson, a lonely wife going through her first pregnancy without the comfort of her husband nearby (played by junior Sara Blike) and John Dodge, a sometimes handyman struggling with depression (played by freshman Marc Andre Weaver). Their conversations seem random at first but soon fall into an easy discourse about daily struggles and finding ways to create purpose in life. Middletown brings laughs, gasps, tension and maybe even tears for its’ viewers. And hey, there is even a disco ball!