Instead of single play, the theater department this semester hosted a production of All in the Timing by David Ives, consisting of absurd, SNL-like skits: such as “Words, Words, Words,” where chimpanzees attempt to write Hamlet under the watchful eye of Doctor Rosenbaum, “English Made Simple,” which mimics an ESL video where characters go off script, “Foreplay,” about the metaphor of mini-golf or “Variations on the Death of Trotsky,” where an axe was smashed into Trotsky’s head, not buried.
These short-but-thought-provoking scenes were uproariously funny.
“I literally fell out of my seat,” said Anuka Ninua, a junior who attended the closing show on Friday, April 4. It was their first time at a SLU-Madrid production.
The play wasn’t just for a laugh. It dealt with fairly modern themes like identity, alienation and timing. Ives wrote All in the Timing between 1987 and 1993 as a collection of one-act plays about, as the name suggests, how our life experiences and interactions are determined by the time in which they happen.
This is explored through (comedic) timing in various ways. In “Foreplay,” directed by student Selin Marie Stark, the audience watches a man take three different women through the same mini-golf date with varying levels of success.
“I’m super grateful to have been able to act alongside my friends this semester,” said Stella Pierce, a sophomore. “I think it makes us perform better when there’s a big audience. It’s nice to see so many people appreciate something we’ve worked so hard on the whole semester.”
In “English Made Simple,” the banality of small talk is explored through an uninvolved, unromantic narrator as two partygoers struggle with their immediate romantic attraction to one another. Noella Conner, a junior, directed “English Made Simple.”
“The entire play deals not only with timing, but rhythm,” Conner said. “All the sketches in mind are so satirical, comedic, like SNL skits. English Made Simple was a little more thought-provoking.”
“There’s a specific rhythm in songs and poetry that David Ives follows when he wrote the play,” Conner continued. “It’s the through-line of all the plays. The flow of the scene is very dependent on line delivery. In a normal scene, you can rely on your scene partner to prompt you if you forget a line. In All in the Timing you didn’t have that luxury. Everything was overlapping.”
In “A Singular Kind of Guy,” a character, played by Kyla McKnight, monologues about their true identity as a typewriter from across a bar. “Who needs a typewriter anymore? Here I figure out what I really am, and I’m an antique already,” McKnight’s character said, shaking their head.
The director, Eloy Gómez Orfila, said the work was challenging and that rehearsals were intense, up until the last minute. “It a very complicated process,” he said. “I was very happy to see everyone in the production rise to the challenge.”
