The Maryland Ghostlight Company opened its production of Sleeping Giant in The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center this weekend, delivering an unsettling and eerie tale about a haunted small town.
The company’s fifth production — fully student-led and produced — featured five actors alternating between multiple roles.
The play begins with a young couple getting engaged to a backdrop of explosive fireworks, an idea one of the characters got from a book titled “Lost Palace Of The Butterfly King.” The explosions from the fireworks awaken an ancient creature in the nearby lake, driving their friend, Billy, to barge into their home in a panic.
Junior computer science major and show producer Jack Campbell, said scenes such as the opening with complex lights and sounds need to be “particularly timed,” require close collaboration and communication between the entire crew.
“It needs to be cohesive,” Campbell said. “It needs to look like the departments are talking to each other, so the sound and the light cues are timed at the same time and work with one another.”
The simple set of a couch, stool, coffee table and dresser created an eerie atmosphere for the evening. With the actors in modern costumes and only feet away from the audience, each character felt authentic and realistic, like any person coming to see the show. This furthered the unease settling into the audience throughout the play.
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The next six scenes of the play hone in on different people that live in the town, all of who are affected by the lake monster in different ways.
After the engagement, two women prepare to go out to brunch. But one of the women begins to act strange when she starts hearing the monster’s voice inside her head repeatedly saying the word “eyeball.”
Turned away from the audience, another actor stands at the back of the stage voicing the monster in a frightened, urgent tone. The woman seems scared to explain what is happening to her, and leaves the friend, and the audience, confused and unnerved.
In another bizarre vignette, a character named “The Convert” attempts to save her friends from weird occurrences in the town, feeding them cupcakes made with poisonous foxglove.
To put on a play with so many moving parts completely by students, Rushi Jain, the play’s stage manager and fight and intimacy captain, said communication is essential.
“We have an incredibly talented and very large production team, and so it’s making sure that we are consistently meeting, that everyone knows what is happening, and also that that information is getting communicated to whoever it needs to be,” the sophomore criminology and criminal justice and psychology major said. “We all still have other things we’re doing outside of this, and it’s incredibly important to be able to lean on the other people in your production team.”
As the play continued, the separate vignettes connected in disturbing ways. A couple is visited by a family member who they claim looks “10 years younger.” She gives credit to a bag of fish guts which she acquired from the paranoid woman in the second scene.
Both the man and woman try it before simultaneously falling to the floor twitching. Afterwards, they’re revived and appear hauntingly similar in mannerisms to the other woman.
The final three scenes continue to descend further into madness and unease. A man finds out that his partner cheated on him with a man with a tattoo of a tentacle around his wrist. Another character meets the Butterfly King himself after dying from the foxglove.
Ellie Matthews, a junior environmental science and policy major, enjoyed the show so much she came back twice.
“I came yesterday to see [my friend] perform, and then I was like, ‘Wow, that was so good. I have to come back again and see it again,’” Matthews said.
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The play raises questions of human reaction and different ways of finding meaning in issues in its buildup to a terrifying conclusion. With a production team of 19 people, Campbell said that it made him “very happy to see all of those people working so well together and to put on the amazing show.”
Jain prided the company on allowing each person involved their own opportunity for individuality.
“Maryland Ghostlight does a really good job of giving each individual designer, production team member and cast member the freedom to make choices that they feel like are right for themselves and the production,” Jain said.
