Fools rush in: a quilt of stories

28.06.2023

This year’s show in English, with a huge cast of students of more than ten different nationalities, represents a patchwork of American theater. Three one-act plays are framed within an adaptation, written by the students themselves, of Neil Simon’s Fools, a comedy in which an eager young teacher sets out to lift the curse that has been placed upon a small Ukrainian village, depriving its inhabitants of their reason. In this version the action has moved to the USA, some time between the 1960s and 1970s, where the “fools” are instead a group of young activists, opposed to the war in Vietnam and the rules imposed on them by their elders in the village. When Lindon, the newly-arrived teacher, falls in love with Linda, the mayor’s daughter, he sparks a series of dramatic events which lead to a climax very different from that of the original play. 

The first of the three one-act plays is a slightly adapted version of Trifles by Susan Glaspell, dating back to the early 20rh century. The action take place in the gloomy kitchen of an isolated farmhouse, where Mr. Wright has been found dead with “a rope around his neck”. Given the suspicious circumstances, his wife has been arrested, despite the lack of hard evidence linking her to the murder. While County Attorney, Sheriff and two neighboring farmers carry out the important men’s work of searching for clues, their wives notice a series of “trifles” which help them to piece together the motive for the crime. Yet, they keep quiet about these apparent trivialities in silent solidarity with the accused.

The next piece also involves crime, but this time we have a classic noir tale set in the America of the 1940s. Sorry, wrong number, originally written as a radio play by Lucille Fletcher, begins with a bedridden woman accidently overhearing a telephone conversation in which a murder is being plotted. Much of the play is taken up with her attempts to convince first the operator and then the police department to trace the call, as she herself becomes increasingly panic-stricken and frantic. Yet who is the intended victim and who has hired a killer to get them out of the way?

We meet death once again in our third one-act play, but there is no sign of murder here. Instead, the Angel of Death is on stage to take away an old lady who has come to the end of her days. In Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, first produced in 1960 and an example of American absurdist theater, Mommy and Daddy deposit Grandma in a sandbox, where she is to die. While congratulating themselves on their own upright conduct, “It pays to do thing well”, the couple’s emotional vacuity and lack of empathy give weight to Albee’s ironic take on the values of the American family.

As our theatrical offering draws to a close, we go back to the world of fools, where nothing is ever quite what it seems …