A few days ago I couldn’t even talk about it, and now it’s history.
“It” is Anonymous Theatre‘s annual one-night-only performance, which was Monday night at the Gerding Theatre.
As I blogged last week, I had the privilege of sitting in on an Anonymous rehearsal at an undisclosed location with a person whose name I couldn’t share. That person is the talented Jana Lee Hamblin, who rehearsed Alex Dremann’s one-act play On the Porch One Crisp Spring Morning with director Darius Pierce.
I wondered how it would go. Jana, who played Mother, had not met Daughter, and didn’t even knew with whom she would be performing. The night of the show, both actresses walked from the audience onto the stage, sat down, and did what professionals do. They made it look easy.
Tom Stoppard’s comical play within a play, The Real Inspector Hound, repeated the anonymous motif, this time with nine actors who navigated the stage, physically interacted, and worked with a set previously unseen. The only glitch I detected was the wandering nature of Magnus’s mustache, which may or may not have been intentional!
I makes for a grueling summer for director Pierce, who must rehearse separately and secretly with each actor. It’s a job he’s done before and obviously finds satisfying. He told the audience Monday that in the future he’d like to try a musical.
Pierce founded Anonymous Theatre Company in 2003 with three friends, all from Brown University. It has turned into quite the local event. The crowd was large and enthusiastic. The players and plays were hugely entertaining. And as one of the feuding play critics in The Real Inspector Hound remarked, it was a “rattling good evening out”.
