Oates one-act premieres tonight

The national premiere of the one-act play The Secret Mirror by famed prose writer Joyce Carol Oates opens tonight on campus. The Theater Arts production will be preceded by another Oates one-act Friday Night and according to group members Oates will be in the audience tonight. The Secret Mirror is a series of short scenes -- many of which are compiled from Oates' renowned short stories. According to Theater Arts member Anthony Byrnes, they are all "very easy to digest." "The audience will walk out not frustrated or exhausted but with a lot of questions," the College senior added. One of the vignettes concerns a man who rents a motel room and dresses up as a female. But Byrnes said that the script never states whether the man is schizophrenic or really feels like a woman inside. "However, the ending is pointed at the audience in a way they wouldn't expect," Byrnes said. "It sets up easy answers for them and then turns them around." Theater Arts member Alexandra Lopez said one of the scenes she acts in is also controversial. "Its the kind of piece that turns feminism on it's ear," College junior Lopez said. "It will make members of the audience who consider themselves intellectual feminists become very concerned by it." Another scene focuses on a dead elderly man who does not want to accept his demise. And another scene is based on the true story of two wealthy teenage boys who plot to kill their parents for the inheritence. "[The Secret Mirror] is very representative of different lifestyles and situations that you don't normally get in a one-act play," Theater Arts member Jef Johnson said. The first one-act, Friday Night, is set in a Midwestern town. In the play, several friends go to a bar and talk one Friday night. The plot revolves around their conversation in which many social issues arise. "It gives you a very realistic situation of a day-to-day experience," Lopez said. Johnson, a recent College graduate, said last week that Oates' specialty is prose -- making her scripts unusual to perform. "It's an interesting experience to take the writings of a fiction writer and put it on the stage," Johnson said. "I think she writes for the reader. Even her plays are written to be read, not performed." The cast has just returned from performing the two plays in the Edinburgh Theater Festival in Ireland. Friday Night and The Secret Mirror open tonight at 8 p.m. at the Annenberg Center Studio Theatre and run through Saturday. Tickets are available on Locust Walk and through the Annenberg Box Office.

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