Written by Sara Hook // Photo by Madison Meyer
The Department of Theatre’s Summer Dinner Theatre productions are popular among Searcy residents, and this summer was no different. This year’s plays included the productions of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940.” Only a few dinner theatre programs have been performed during the school year, one of them being the last summer 2022 production, “The Play that Goes Wrong.” Director of the play and department chair Steven Frye said those plays that are continued are chosen because they involve a lot of students or alumni and showcase a particular aspect of the theatre program.
“[The actors] committed to stay with us through the reprise,” Frye said. “Some of them are actually working in other states, and they’ll be going home after all of this, because several are alumni that are working with us on the show.”
The students who work for the Summer Dinner Theatre program work eight-hour days in the summer, alongside professional staff.
“Our students get to work beside their professors and go, ‘Oh, yeah, they really are a good performer. Maybe they know what they’re talking about,’” Frye said. “The same thing holds through with design or construction. When you’re working beside our staff, it’s a great learning experience.”
Senior and stage manager Kat Ream said the professors involved were very encouraging.
“If I am being completely honest, I was at first a little intimidated,” Ream said. “We were co-workers for the summer, but [they] were still my professors and helped me learn more about the process of theatre.”
“The Play that Goes Wrong” involves technical work with the stage — floors collapsing, pictures falling and walls caving in, among many other things. It took several days to perfect those technical aspects, Ream said.
“This play in particular took quite a bit of patience, and trials on how things would work,” Ream said. “This is a show where we needed that extra time to perfect everything.”
The play is every director’s nightmare, Frye said, and it runs because of the people working backstage to operate the set.
“The set itself, and the crew running it backstage is almost a character in the show itself, because things fall off walls, things change, strange things happen on the set that you go, ‘How did that happen?’ Frye said. “And it’s because there are a lot of dedicated professionals working to make those things happen.”
The technical aspect was not the only challenging part of the play to pull off. Senior acting major Asher Patten said there is more external work than internal in comedies like “The Play that Goes Wrong.”
“For these kinds of things — this is farce, this is over-the-top comedy — the challenge is, I think, the physicality: sculpting a character, and how he moves, and the faces he makes,” Patten said.
Upcoming theatre productions include the Homecoming musical: “Cinderella,” “The Rivals” and “The Crucible.”
