'Evil Hour' to feature festive theme

The tickets for An Evil Hour, the Theatre Arts show opening tonight, invite audience members to join the actors in front of the Furness Building. Instead of warming up backstage, the actors will appear in costume on College Green at 7 p.m. to mingle with the audience and sell tickets. The actors and the audience will then parade up Locust Walk to the Annenberg Studio Theater. College senior and cast member Jeff Weinstock said the cast will encourage audience members to dance and sing during the parade as well as throughout the show. Wharton senior Brad Reimer, the show's producer, said the parade will set the tone for the rest of the show, which incorporates a lot of South American folk music in a festival setting. "[It] takes place in a South American town during the winter season and it's basically a study of the various gossip and intrigue that goes on in the town -- political and personal," Reimer said. The show addresses what happens when a lot of secrets come out in a small town through a series of lampoon cartoons. Wharton senior and cast member Jennifer Platzkere explained that the lampoons are flyers secretly posted on people's doors, revealing gossip about them. For instance, one flyer reveals to a man that his wife is having an affair, which leads him to kill her. Both Reimer and Platzkere emphasized the fact that students are playing members of a South American acting troop performing a show. "There is never the pretense that we are not just actors playing these characters," Platzkere said. She also stated that this aspect of the show allows the actors some latitude. A scarf can be an entire costume, and one actor can play several roles. The show's director, Theater Arts Lecturer Ian Watson, said that he has served as a guide for the cast and crew. He said he has great respect for the actors' ability to put together such a quality show in so short a period of time. The show is based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book In Evil Hour. Watson provided the cast with a synopsis of the story from which they developed the script. The group went through the book, scene by scene, and then improvised what they had just read, allowing the salient points and the framework of a script to emerge. Platzkere said she felt that since the show was created through improvisation, the characters are more realistic because their personalities emerged naturally out of the actors that portray them. The parade will begin at 7 p.m. tonight between Meyerson Hall and the Furness Building. The show continues tomorrow and runs through November 23.

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