Canaday B-12 Transforms into "A Quiet Place"

Four students meet up, drop their backpacks, and settle into the Canaday Common Room after a busy day of navigating the slush and attending classes. From the outside, one might imagine that they are hunkering down for an evening of problem sets and class presentations. But this is no study group. Instead, the students comprise the small cast and crew working on Brendan Gall’s “A Quiet Place.” The play, which will run from Feb. 6 to 8 in Canaday B-12, centers around David (Nicolas E. O’Connor ’17) and Henry (Thomas W. Peterson ’18), two men who are trapped in a black box theater without any idea of how they arrived there.

“The play explores what happens when two humans are placed together when stripped of qualities that we might think are necessary for humans to live, such as eating or going to work, having a family, having an environment,” director Samuel A. Hagen ’18 says. “All there is is the black space and a chair.” Serendipitously, Hagen lives in Canaday B-12, a dorm room that previously housed playwright and producer Randy Weiner ’87 of American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) fame. In fact, Hagen says that a 1983 production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Huis Clos" ("No Exit"), directed by Weiner and his roommate in Canaday B-12, inspired his staging of “A Quiet Place.”

“I knew I wanted to do something with theater in alternate spaces,” Hagen says. “So by happenstance at some point during the semester, I Googled Canaday B-12 to see if there was anything online about our room, and I found the article [about “Huis Clos”].”

“A Quiet Place” promises to be especially compelling for its use of space (or the lack of it). In the room, an 8 x 4 foot “stage” forces the actors to restrain their motions and promotes a feeling of claustrophobia. Since the play focuses on the power dynamics between David and Henry, forcing the two into a small space makes the tensions rise rather quickly, according to the cast. “I think the show really sells itself because of the space,” producer Gita C. Abhiraman ’18 says. “People want to know, ‘Oh, how are these people going to put on a play in a Canaday room?’ Because everyone knows that Canaday is cramped.”

Indeed, the production staff advises people who “are easily frightened or subject to claustrophobia” to skip the show, according to a note on the Facebook invite. “It should be really intense, moving, frightening maybe at times,” Abhiraman says. “Overall, I think it’s an example of how art can be pulled out of its usual environment, and I think sometimes when you make people uncomfortable, it can generate something rather special.”

—Staff writer Melissa C. Rodman can be reached at melissa.rodman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @melissa_rodman.