Nicholas and Colby were expecting their first child, but ended up with something very different — a smudge.
The baby, described as “sloppy and purplish grey,” gains the title of smudge due to her deformities and abnormal appearance.
Premiering tonight in Cave Theatre, “Smudge” explores the dynamics of parenthood. Director Kyle Stoffers wants the audience to appreciate healthy children because not many people understand how common autism and birth defects are.
“My main goal was to produce something that was honest and different from most of the other shows that we produce in the Cave, in that it would entertain as well as make the audience think about their own expectations as far as parenthood,” he said.
The baby, known as both Smudge and Cassandra, is deformed, and the parents have to overcome their original hopes and take care of her.
Monica Ramirez, a freshman musical theatre major, plays Colby. As the mother of the child, she has to interact with the baby, who is represented by a carriage onstage.
“Working with an inanimate object, that’s been really hard, responding to beeps and flashes of light being called by a stage manager,” she said. “That is a challenge and an obstacle.”
Brent Eickhoff, assistant director and a sophomore directing and theatre education major, worked on manufacturing the carriage holding the baby. He used a variety of objects, such as color-changing light bulbs and fiber-optic cables, to create it. For inspiration, he looked to see how it was made in past productions of the play.
“Figuring out how to build the thing is the hardest part,” he said. “It’s not that complicated; it’s simple enough to figure out once you start reading it.”
In addition to the technology bringing the baby to life, the actors work to bring it to life through their characters. To help visualize what they are working with, each drew a depiction of the smudge.
“It’s been really hard when you have situations that need to build and you don’t really have anything to respond to,” said Jordan Rowe, a freshman theatre studies major playing Nicholas. “You have to imagine it in your head.”
As an all-freshmen cast, the actors also had to work to connect with their much-older characters. Jeff Pierpoint, a freshman musical theatre major, said he is very different from his character Pete, Nicholas’ older brother.
“Because we’ve spent so much time in this production, we all have become very cohesive,” he said. “The amount of time we’ve spent working together has allowed us to delve into the story. We’ve all made relationships with the story that we’re trying to tell.”
Despite the actors being different from their characters in both age and personality, Stoffers felt they were the right actors for the production.
“It’s definitely great to work with a cast of all freshmen because I had the option of upperclassmen people, but I felt like these people together would be the best to tell the story,” Stoffers said. “I got to cast the people that I wanted and it just happened that they were freshmen.”
Just as Stoffers picked a young cast, he called himself a young director.
“One of the biggest challenges would be just being a young director and just not really knowing how to form the production as a whole, just putting together a show of this magnitude that has such a complicated message but that is told in a simple way,” he said.
Marge:
What: “Smudge”
Where: Cave Theatre, AC 007
When: 7:30 p.m. Today-Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday
Cost: $6, available at the door or University Theatre Box Office
