Gin Mummy at Theatre at Bridgewater College

I always enjoy working with Theatre at Bridgewater College. They are flexible about the kinds of projects I can pick, and they encourage me to think outside the box and work in new ways. After a couple of years where I had to pivot from my original plans due to the audition pool not matching my proposed material, I decided this time to hold auditions without announcing a play and then select a play based on who showed up and showed out. This is how we ended up doing Gin Mummy by Melissa Leilani Larson. It had been on my list for a year or so, but I hadn’t found an opportunity to direct it.

Gin Mummy is a very fun play, and particularly good for college students. It’s a goofy comedy, written to feel like a late-Victorian play, but with certain modern sensibilities. Also there is a mummy that catches fire. The only challenge we had with the script was how little the students knew about the material Larson was referencing or the social expectations of the late 19th Century. So I found myself having to explain details about the role of young women in society. Yet another reason actors need to study history!

Due to some limitations in technical resourcing and general space constraints, we decided to do a site-specific production in a small house owned by the college. Gin Mummy is a “drawing room comedy”—sort of a pastiche on Oscar Wilde or similar—and staging it in a literal drawing room was a delightful choice. We’re always trying to challenge what students think theater is or should be, and doing site-specific theater certainly opened some minds. One of the students who was helping out backstage said that he was surprised to be doing this for his first college show. “I had kind of imagined, you know, that we’d be doing real theater.” So I asked him what is required for real theater. He started naming elements (a light board! a curtain!) and I pointed out that many, many theaters throughout history did not have these things. He finally said, “I guess I need to think a little more about what theater is.” Which is exactly the point.

We had a student actor drop out about halfway through the production. As it happened, she was playing the oldest character, sort of a grand dame aunt (the Maggie Smith role, if you will). Instead of replacing her with another student, the department hired professional actor Sarah Levine McClelland to serve as a guest artist and mentor. Sarah and I had worked together on several plays prior to this. She was in Artemisia’s Intent at Silk Moth Stage, and directed Silk Moth’s The Grown-Up, as well as being part of the company for As You Like It, which I directed at the Wayne.

Having a professional actor in the company was immensely helpful to the students. They learned a ton by observation. At one point, Sarah asked me for a clarification while I was doing notes, and when I started to answer, she suggested that we could just discuss it later. I replied that I would much rather talk about it in front of the students, because I wanted them to learn how an actor and a director can work through a question together. Later, several students told me that that interaction was one of their biggest takeaways from the production. Beyond that, they spoke highly of the value they got from observing her preparation, warm-ups, note-taking, and more. We can say these things to our students all day long, but seeing a professional put them into action was much more powerful.