Everybody experiences the extreme discomfort of being fourteen-years-old. This fall’s play, Seven Minutes in Heaven by Steven Levenson, perfectly captures the stereotypes young teenagers try so desperately to adopt.
With limited plotline, the play focuses in depth on its characters: three boys and three girls at a basement party in the mid-1990s, “After Kurt, before Monica,” according to Levenson’s stage directions. They cover all recognizable teenage stereotypes: “the dorky social misfit who is the object of everyone’s ridicule, the girl who uses acerbic humor to mask her insecurities and the bullying jock who revels in the details of his workout regimen.”
As the play continues, though, they shed their facades and the audience glimpses their inner vulnerabilities, fears, and affections.
Half the cast is new to the co-curricular theater program. Rhys Louis ’12, for example, has focused primarily on musical theater. He explained, “In musicals, you have multiple outlets for the character’s passion: the dancing, the singing, the acting. But in straight theatre, two of those are cut out-you have less to work with, which makes it much more difficult.”
Director of Theater John Reese chose the script because “it embodies many of the issues that teenagers encounter at that particular age.”
Says Becca Cooley ’12 of the script, “half the lines you know you’ve said before. Working in a play where everything is so real is such an experience.” The experience has been rewarding for Cooley: “As an actor, finding the motivation behind the actions reveals so much about our age group, those younger, and even those older.”
Seven Minutes in Heaven will be showing in the Reid Black Box Theatre at 7:00 p.m., Tuesday, November 2, through Saturday, November 6.