Pudding To Riff on ‘Tent Commandments’

Prudent onlookers might derisively call the Hasty Pudding Theatricals—the University’s traditional source for male drag-centered dramatic art—a freak show. This year, they’d be right.

The Pudding selected yesterday the script for its 159th annual stage production, which will open Feb. 23. The burlesque comedy, tentatively titled “The Tent Commandments,” follows a European big-top circus and its semi-occult side show.

The peace among the attractions collapses, however, when it’s decreed that only one tent may be pitched in the area.

“There’s an ongoing competition,” said Joshua M. Brener ’07, president of the Pudding, “and the circus is down on its luck and looking to fight off the onslaught of the advancing freak show.”

In the midst of this rivalry, one of the circus’s star acrobats develops a verboten love for one of the freaks, a failed Japanese Samurai-cum-sword-swallower fittingly named Ai Swallows.

“The Ancient Tent Commandments forbid any mixing of the big-tops and freaks,” said Warland L. “Trey” Kollmer ’07, one of the script’s co-writers. “That’s why the star-crossed lovers can’t be together.”

Kollmer and writing partner Joshua Clay Phillips ’07 labored through a 12-week comp process before learning that the Pudding had chosen their script. The pair saw its initial submissions develop into a full script by mid-July, but the revisions are still ongoing.

“There’s a whole lot of genius—Einstein is one type, Dali is another—and we just need to figure out what type of genius we want to be,” Kollmer said.

That genius has been difficult to flesh out, as Phillips described, “Just overall, it’s a tough process, and everyone who does it knows it’s tough.”

The duo wasn’t without theatrical experience, however. Phillips drew on his time in a College screenwriting course. Kollmer, a veteran of the campus improvisation troupe, On Thin Ice, took acting and writing classes with the New York City comedy group, Upright Citizens Brigade. Each also submitted scripts to the Pudding in previous years but were rejected during the comp process.

Despite their newfound success backstage, neither writer has considered stepping into the limelight himself.

“I would be in drag, but it’d have to be a loose-fitting dress, because there’s no hiding the bulge. It’d just be unbelievable,” Kollmer said. “I don’t think the Pudding has the budget for the duct tape you’d need to put me in the woman pants.”

-Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.