After a semester-long hiatus, Hoff Theater echoed with the shouts and cheers of a happy, if not slightly eclectic midnight crowd.
UMD’s one and only Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast group, Satanic Mechanics, performed their second show of the semester December 6. The group is back and better than ever after disbanding during spring semester of 2014.
Senior Russian literature and language and Spanish literature and language double major Teressa Ferraro is SM’s producer. She explained their hiatus was a needed break, only if they could return strong.
“Rocky Horror is sort of a niche thing,” she said. “It’s not something that everyone is super into. [We had] enough to cast a show, have full tech, have fun bits in it, but not enough that you have to make up work for everyone.”
After the semester she joined SM, she recalled “an influx of a lot of new or younger members and they didn’t necessarily come in with an understanding of Rocky culture” and a loss of older group members.
Ferraro said that group members dealt with the “really drastic culture shift” for one semester, holding it together for their fans and themselves, before the university, their advisor, and head group members sat down at a meeting and decided they needed some time to regroup. She started planning their return the Monday after the disbandment.
“It was a really intense emotional process to go through everything and restructure everything,” Ferraro said.
They reformatted the running of the group, eliminating 9-hour board elections, consolidating a dozen-membered board into fewer positions, and writing a 20-page constitution.
“That’s a little less fun than getting on stage and removing your clothing,” Ferraro joked.
For a short period of time, there was another shadowcast group on campus, a smaller group of mostly older SM members who named themselves Mercy Killing. They only did one performance of Rocky Horror as a final farewell.
“It was just really important, especially for our director, just because she just put so much effort in,” Ferraro said. “She was so excited to be able to direct a Rocky and then she couldn’t and she was really, really upset. She ended up doing her show, which was good.”
Most of Mercy Killing’s students who didn’t graduate returned to SM with new initiates, or ‘sprouts’ in SM terms.
“SM is, at its core, a theater group that performs The Rocky Horror Picture Show as well as other shadow casted shows,” freshman Alexis Wohlsetter said. “But it is also more than that. It is a group of the most accepting people I have ever met.”
From group members like Wohlsetter, who, after an introduction to the movie from her mother a few years ago, played Magenta this weekend, to Rocky Horror virgins, the event is a memorable one for everyone. It unites the audience under the pretext of a flick that is just as ridiculous as some of the costumes fans wear. The antic- of waiting in line in Stamp to the announcement of raffle winners and their prizes to the opening notes and black screen of the film itself all factor into the creation of a longstanding tradition both on campus and within its niche audience.
Like any sort of theater group, SM holds auditions and then rehearsals, twice a week with more thrown in as the show nears. The days before the show hold 4-hour long dress rehearsals, all to culminate in a more likely than not two and a half hour experience.
Now in charge of being able to physically have the show, Ferraro works with their main funding source, the SGA, Student Org and the Office of Student Conduct to make sure SM can maintain their spot in campus history.
“They’re really, really invested in making sure that we do well,” she said. “We’ve basically been doing the same event three times a semester for almost 20 years, so it’s a pretty safe investment.”
Wohlsetter found it a safe investment for her our life. When she joined SM, she said that she finally found her place at college.
“We can all sit around and discuss the most random topics, from favorite movies to strange childhood stories to other things that might make some other people uncomfortable,” she said. “But I don’t think anyone in SM is ever uncomfortable and to us, that is normal.”
…-pation. (I’m not that cruel. I’d never leave you guys hanging.)