When I showed up at Tansill Theater to see and usher for a play called 4 Dead in Ohio: Antigone at Kent State, I had little to no idea of what to expect. And neither, it seemed, did anyone else.
This general feeling of what-the-heck-is-going-to-happen-next started with the instructions we volunteer ushers were given for the evening’s performance. House Manager Alex Iezzi ’15 passed out mock newspaper clippings (headline: “4 ‘Bums’ Killed at Kent”) and directed the three of us to approach audience members as they entered the theater lobby. Having cornered our unsuspecting victims, we were then to urgently ask, “Have you heard the news?” and thrust the flyer into their hands so they could read it before the show began. The clippings provided background information about the play’s catalyzing incident: National Guardsmen’s fatal shooting of four Kent State University students during an anti-war protest on May 4, 1970.
But this invasion of personal space was a mere portent of even more unorthodox things to come. Presently, Andrew Marco ’15 burst into the lobby, urging attendees to come upstairs “for the meeting.” We soon reached the performance space, but anyone who had then been expecting to settle into conventional theater seats — complete with a reassuring degree of physical distance between actors and spectators — would have been sorely disappointed.
Instead, the thoroughly disoriented and confused attendees went ahead and took a seat on any one of the couches, beanbags and thick rugs that surrounded the stage. There were a handful of rows toward the back of the theater that offered up traditional seating, but these were set aside for overflow accommodations in case the performance sold out.
Sold out it was, and for good reason. In drawing upon a number of sources for its inspiration and content, 4 Dead in Ohio revealed itself to be a thoroughly cohesive, captivating and moving piece of theater. The actors’ identities and realities were constantly in flux, yet their skillful storytelling and emotional honesty always remained crystal clear.
At first, the eight-actor ensemble drew us all into the gripping scenario of a fictional, student-run midnight-vigil-cum-support-group taking place three days after the Kent State tragedy. The plot soon thickened, however, as these characters began reading Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (itself an English translation of Sophocles’ classic tragedy Antigone) aloud together in the hope that the play’s explorations of rebellion, redemption and the true meaning of justice might start to heal the emotional wounds that the shooting had inflicted upon them.
The production incorporated not only these two dramatic texts but also ’60s protest songs (both recordings and live performances by the actors), quotations about the Kent State massacre from primary sources and additional dialogue that the ensemble of actors wrote themselves — all in a tidy, fast-paced seventy-five minutes of action.
But, as director David Jaffe related in a post-performance talk between the creative team and the audience, the wide variety of content in the final product represents a mere fraction of all that they had come up with: “There’s so much creativity that isn’t even in what you saw.” However, Spencer Lutvak ’16 revealed that this wasn’t always true, recalling their first rehearsal, when “David basically admitted to us that nothing existed. He said, ‘If you want to leave right now, just get up and leave. I won’t be offended.’”
Coming up with original material wasn’t the only challenge that the actors faced. Julian Gordon ’14 said that one of the biggest difficulties of the creative process was figuring out which materials to include and which to omit. In The Burial at Thebes, for example, monologue and dialogue interact with speeches from a Greek chorus. With these chorus sections, just as with any other materials, the ensemble always had to consider (as Gordon put it) “Do they fit in our world?”
But their intensive four weeks of writing, revising, assembling and rehearsing (a process Jaffe called “collective creation”) certainly seem to have paid off. During the talk back, several audience members expressed how much the play had touched them. One grateful attendee summed it up perfectly: “I … have a friend who was there [at Kent State]. And I feel like, with this performance, I can go back home and tell him, ‘Your friends have been honored.’”
