LOGAN — The 2022-23 Theatre Arts season at Utah State University kicked off this week with Love and Information by prolific British playwright Caryl Churchill, which director Michael Shipley describes as “ … a bit of an enigma.”
I’ll say.
It’s a series of vignettes strung together to give Shipley’s performers a chance to flex their artistic muscles without the constraints of plot development, character names or descriptions.
Love and Information is 50 brief scenes with more than 100 characters and all the actors have to work with is what the characters say in that moment.
But what’s it all mean? Whatever you think it means, which probably suits Churchill down to the ground.
In her early career in the 1960s and 1970s, Churchill wrote radio dramas and television plays. While serving as resident dramatist for the Royal Court Theatre in London, her plays explored sexual politics and the dynamics of power between men and women.
Most recently, Churchill’s works have been pushing the idea of a play beyond its accepted imaginative boundaries.
That’s sort of what Love and Information is about.
Maybe.
Shipley explains that there really is an order to the apparent chaos of Love and Information.
The play consists of seven sections, with each section containing seven scenes. Churchill’s script specifies that the sections must be performed in the order she wrote, but the scenes within each section can be performed in any order.
“It’s essentially a theatrical collage,” the director adds. “To bring this play to life, the actors have created specific circumstances and relationships for each of the scenes in which they appear. They have also chosen to perform the scenes in each section in a random order which is revealed to them live on stage during each performance.
“The mathematics — given the number of scenes – indicates that there are over 35,000 possible combinations of scenes or 35,000 versions of the play that the audience could experience.”
Love and Information is book-ended by opening and closing scenes in which all the characters are on stage. In the opening, they are performing seemingly random acts. In the finale, they play a TV game of similar to “Jeopardy” with impossibly hard questions.
Again, what it means is what you think it means.
Or maybe not.
Shipley has assembled a cast of 14 talented actors and 4 understudies.
Some of them are familiar faces. Ryan Adams – a veteran of the highly charged 2022 USU staged reading of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts — is in the mix, along with Mia Gatherum from the university’s delightful production of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberly in 2021.
Otherwise, Shipley’s cast is mostly newcomers to the USU stage.
They are Ollie Chieppa, Brynn Francis, Mason Garcia, Gray Harding, Harmon Jackson, Marin Robinson, Dylan Seely, Ethan Shaw, Fin Sheffer, Summer Shoell, Willoughby Staley and McKenna Finley, plus understudies Josh Wandrey, Cecily Udy, Megan Bedell and Cameron Kunz.
Undoubtedly, we’ll see more of these gifted performers later in the USU season.
Evening performances of Love and Information will continue in the Block Box Theatre of the Chase Fine Arts Center on the USU campus at 7:30 p.m. through Saturday, Oct. 8. A matinee performance will also be offered at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
Audience members are warned that Churchill’s play has mildly adult themes.
Next up on the university’s theater schedule is the controversial musical drama Spring Awakening that will debut on Oct. 21.