Dark Comedy Kicks Off CFA Fringe Festival

Harrison Grant Meacham (CFA’15) (left) and Ben Salus (CFA’16) perform in the premiere of The Whitmores, a play by Ben Ducoff (CFA’15). “People will squirm,” says director Michael Hammond, a CFA assistant professor of acting. Photo by Renee E. Yancey

As a College of Fine Arts theater arts student, Ben Ducoff (CFA’15) was exposed to a lot of writing about race in America, but he engaged in very little open discussion about an issue he refers to as “the giant elephant in the room.” Ducoff has taken on that elephant in his scathingly comic play The Whitmores, which kicks off CFA’s 18th annual Fringe Festival tonight. The script is likely to jolt the audience out of its comfort zone. “People will squirm,” says director Michael Hammond, a CFA assistant professor of acting, a playwright, and an actor who was a longtime member of Shakespeare & Company. “The play is very confrontational in relation to the audience, and it’s probably going to rub a lot of people the wrong way.” But it’s entertaining, he says, “a very dark comedy, but it’s comedy.”

Several years in the making and part of BU’s New Play Initiative, The Whitmores is one of three productions—one from the School of Theatre, two from the School of Music—featured in this year’s festival, which runs through October 26 at the BU Theatre. The festival seeks to broaden theater and opera audiences and push artistic boundaries with new or freshly interpreted, compelling fare and with productions that are minimally staged yet richly imagined. In addition to the five-performance run of The Whitmores, the festival will include composer John Musto’s contemporary opera Later the Same Evening, inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper, and La Tragédie de Carmen, an intimate reimagining of Georges Bizet’s classic French opera about a doomed romance between a seductive gypsy and a Spanish soldier. Carmen will be directed by Jim Petosa, director of the School of Theatre, and conducted by William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music and artistic director of the Opera Institute.

The Whitmores is about a couple living in an exclusive gated community whose sense of entitlement pits them against the community’s management, which refuses to approve their expansion plans. In frustration, the Whitmores invite the community’s president and her husband to dinner and hire an African American caterer with a record as a mob hit man. Chaos ensues, as Ducoff puts it, when the Whitmores expect the caterer to serve not only food, but also retribution. “Much of the play has to do with the Whitmores convincing the caterer why murdering their guests is a reasonable and just thing to do,” says Hammond. “Their desire for revenge is rooted in their feud with the community management, but they also have these wild political notions about how they are giving a black man and his family the opportunity to earn a lot of money” and rise out of their class. “The play is ready and willing to skewer any and all pieties, liberal and conservative,” he adds. “If Ducoff has a political agenda, it borders on anarchy—certainly the dynamic on stage is anarchistic.”

Ducoff admits he is lampooning the Cleveland suburbs of his youth, which he describes as a soulless bubble he routinely fled by hanging out at a now-defunct strip mall barbecue joint called Whitmore’s, where mostly African American customers would line up at all hours of the night to order food from a guy behind protective Plexiglas. He still nurses an obsession with the place, which inspired the play’s title. Although the Whitmores were drawn from his parents and his girlfriends’ parents, the play “is not my f— you to Cleveland,” he says. It’s a much broader salvo, one he hopes will provoke audiences.

The Whitmores will be the School of Theatre’s official 2014 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival entry. The play began as a class assignment, says Ducoff, who is white and whose previous dark comic romp, about Nelson Mandela’s death (written when the legendary South African was still alive), unexpectedly and unfortunately coincided with the actual event.

His “subversive sense of humor” caught the attention of his colleagues early on, according to Hammond. “Our only concern was trying to keep him channeling that in a creative way, and that’s what he’s done,” says Hammond. “This is a young man with enormous energy and talent.”

Musto’s Later the Same Evening, directed by Allison Voth, a CFA associate professor of music, was inspired by five Edward Hopper paintings: Room in New York, Hotel Window, Hotel Room, Two on the Aisle, and Automat. With a libretto by Mark Campbell and stage direction by Jason King Jones, associate artistic director at the Olney Theatre Center in Olney, Md., the opera explores the lives of the characters depicted in each painting, interweaving their stories during the course of one evening in New York City in 1932. The production will run for four performances on October 18 and 19.

“It’s a lullaby to New York. The music is that late-night New York…lamp-shining-in-a-dark-street…that kind of atmosphere,” Musto told NPR’s Weekend Edition.

“John is a brilliant composer with strong classical training, but he is also a great lover of Broadway,” says Voth, explaining how a Broadway tune from a musical within the opera runs through it like a leitmotif. “The way he weaves the two together is so brilliant. Opera nerds will get their fill, but a person coming to opera for the first time will warm to the Broadway themes.”

All Fringe Festival performances are at the BU Theatre’s Lane-Comley Studio 21o, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston. Performance dates and times are as follows: The Whitmores: Wednesday, October 8, 7:30 p.m., Thursday, October 9, 7:30 p.m., Friday, October 10, 8 p.m., Saturday, October 11, 2 (talk-back) and 8 p.m.; Later the Same Evening: Saturday, October 18, 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, October 19, 2 and 7:30 p.m.; and La Tragédie de Carmen: Saturday, October 25, 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, October 26, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Purchase tickets here or call 617-933-8600. To get to the BU Theatre, take the MBTA Green Line E trolley to Symphony or the Orange Line to Mass Avenue.