Last weekend, MFA candidate Patrick Flynn staged a play with an especially poignant message for seniors scheduled to graduate in May: Don't take your life or yourself too seriously at age 22.
Titled "Untitled Masterpiece," the 45-minute play was commissioned and originally produced by Contemporary Stage Company last summer. Since then, Flynn has tightened and rewritten a few scenes to get more laughs, and he wanted to try it out on a fresh audience.
The play is based around Joseph K. Meursault (played by Nick Jonczak, a freshman in the School of International Service and Department of Performing Arts), a recent college graduate with a communication major, and his attempts to immediately "do something great" with his life.
Trouble is, he can't get a job without experience and can't get experience without a job. So he ends up taking whatever job he can get until he has simply had enough.
The results are hilarious. The play is full of quick transitions and various styles that pay tribute to different facets of television, which are made more ridiculous on stage. From drama, sitcom and game show styles to commercials, infomercials, tributes to the thought bubbles on "Blind Date" and quotes from "A League of Their Own," this show has it all.
"The thing I really like about this play is that there's something in it for everyone," Flynn said. "People of different ages laugh at different jokes."
"I just write what makes me laugh and hopefully it makes other people laugh at the same time."
There were several memorable performances: Bartley's portrayal of the "Possibly Canadian Hassidic Bisexual" stole the stage with very few lines; Jennifer Cumberworth, a sophomore in SOC, was taught that "slutty is the new feminism"; and Emily Dickens, a senior in DPA, listed some very interesting side effects for a new medication, including "bleeding from the eyes."
The play also features performances from Flynn's younger brother, Roddy Flynn, a junior in the School of Public Affairs.
"Patrick started acting long before I did, and he is really the reason I started doing theater, but we've never done a show together before," Roddy Flynn said. He really enjoyed the experience, because "working with him makes it easier, because he knows how to talk to me and I know how to ask him questions. I'm not going to freak out if he tells me I'm terrible or something."
The most challenging scene in the play occurs when the audience is "caught up to speed" on what had gone on in the past at Meursault's new work place.
Reminiscent of the few minutes at the beginning of most television series where it gets repeated quickly what happened in the last episode, the scene features sharp angles and pivots, position changes and disjointed lines that didn't so much tell the story as omit all the details that help it make sense. It is perfectly ironic in that it doesn't actually catch the audience up to speed at all.
Perhaps 'Untitled Masterpiece' is so poignant because of its message.
"I feel kind of stupid giving advice because I'm still in grad school," Patrick Flynn said. "But, the biggest thing I learned [in the three years between graduating from college and going to grad school] is not to put anything off."
"A lot of my friends who want to be actors and musicians and filmmakers and the like, now they're working middle management jobs and they say they are just trying to save a few more dollars before moving to New York or L.A. and chasing their dream," Flynn added.
"But they're stuck. They're never going to actually do it," he said.
His final advice to the Class of 2007: "If you really want to do something, just do it. Try your hand at it, and if you fail, you fail, but at least you didn't put it off"
