The UB Post

Issue date: 10/4/06 Section: Feature

Opening night draws near for the University of Baltimore’s Student Center Performing Arts Theater. Through a partnership with Saint Paul Street-based company the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, the university is bringing Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Angels in America: Part One: Millennium Approaches” to the Student Center’s fifth floor on Oct. 18.

As part of Mayor Martin O’Malley’s Free Fall Baltimore project, the October run will be open to the public and free of charge. As such, there will be no excuse for missing the potentially jarring first foray into live theatre of our young and still mild-mannered Student Center.

The Baltimore Office of Promotions & The Arts (BOPA), the same that puts on Artscape and made this year’s hold on admission fees at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum possible, sent out a call for local theatres willing to transpose their productions into unusual spaces. The essential aim of the project seems to be improving access: putting the arts in more public spaces, nixing admission and perhaps fostering a citywide dialogue.

The partnership between UB and Spotlighters was born of one such ongoing conversation between Susan Luchey, director of UB’s Center for Student Involvement, and Fuzz Roark, executive director at Spotlighters. Introduced by Renee Presha, a UB student and grant writing intern at Spotlighters, the two shared ideas about theatre in general and at UB.

“[Luchey] joined our board in May, and at the same time, BOPA was preparing this festival to give more people a chance to get involved with theatre and arts. It was an opportunity for Spotlighters to get into the community at a place where we had a contact and present for free because it was underwritten,” Roark said. “It’s a chance to showcase Spotlighters, the new UB space and some really good theatre.”

Chris Hart, manager of public information at UB, cited “pent-up demand” and an “effort to bring the arts to UB,” when he called the partnership “a perfect fit that works without turning each other inside out.”

The transfer to the Student Center Theater’s stage won’t be without its challenges. UB’s space is, in many ways, state of the art, but significantly smaller than the round format that the Spotlighters are used to at home. In the Spotlighters’ space, the show starts with the actors standing out in the audience. The community feeling expands from there.

“We’re not trying to keep it a secret that these actors are really these people. The audience obviously can tell. If they’re in on it, they’re more willing to come along with you,” said Shannon Maddox, producer of “Angels” and co-founder of MadShag, a New York City production company. “I think it’s when you try to overcompensate that it gets lost in translation and you get stuck between realism and theatricality.”

To that end, it becomes “a much more collaborative effort, with the audience’s imagination involved as well as the actors,” Roark said.

With logistical concerns looming, the company elected to strip the production down to a dramatic reading, with Spartan sets and an easily transported multimedia slideshow for location backdrops of New York City.

“Some plays need design elements, but we have such a strong team that it almost becomes another character. The production we’re mounting at Spotlighters has design elements, but for the students at UB and an educational experience, it’s really about the text,” Maddox said. “It’s called, sometimes, a perfect play. It has these hated characters, but it’s written in such a way that, whether or not you agree with their points of view, you can’t doubt their commitment to their words.”

Joan Weber, UB’s theater events coordinator, described “Angels” as “so filled to the brim with topicality,” that it would be a disservice to describe it in brief.

Both Roark and Maddox corroborate a dense, word-driven and exceedingly well-conceived play.

Controversial when first staged and by all accounts timeless 15 years later, the play concerns itself with the relationships of its characters, and lets the backdrop of the Reagan era’s indifference, ignorance and fear in the face of the AIDS epidemic speak somewhat for itself. It pulls in characters of all walks and conflicting opinions (many of the actors play more than one role), evokes both belly laughs and anguish, and blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, history and the present.

One night engagements can be perilous, but their immediacy and dynamism are hard to deny. Oct. 18 will set the tone for UB’s Student Center Performing Arts Theater, and according to Roark, the partners are on the same page.

“They’re very pleased that we’re not going to sanitize it in any way,” Roark said. “It will be as real and as gritty as it was on Broadway.”

“Angels in America: Part Two: Perestroika” will be presented by Spotlighters Theatre in June.

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Spotlighters Theatre

817 St. Paul St.

Baltimore, MD 21202

Students $17, general $20

phone – (410) 752-1225

web – www.spotlighters.org

e-mail – info@spotlighters.org



“Angels in America: Part One:

Millennium Approaches”

performed by Spotlighters Theatre



Oct. 18, 8 to 11 p.m.

Student Center Performing Arts Theater

Reservations required, tickets limited, free



Oct. 13 through Nov. 12.

8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday

2 p.m. on Sunday

Spotlighters Theatre

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