Elizabeth Danello ’14 portrays Lisa in the 2012 Bates production of “Collected Stories.”

Collected Stories, a two-character play about ambition, artistic conflicts, rivalries and the rise and fall of a friendship, comes to life at Bates in performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Dec. 7 and 8, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 9, in Black Box Theater, 305 College St.

Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information please call 207-786-8294.

Donald Margulies’ drama uses the story of Ruth Steiner, a flash-in-the-pan writer in her declining years, and her rising protégé, Lisa Morrison, to examine issues of artistic integrity, as well as the realities of life as an artist, over a six-year span. Lisa begins as an insecure student, blossoms into a successful short-story writer and then writes a novel based on Ruth’s affair with real-world poet Delmore Schwartz.

Together, they struggle with the moral dilemma of whether the events of one person’s life are fair game for use in another person’s art.

The cast consists of Bates junior Elizabeth Danello of Washington, D.C., as Lisa and Mary Meserve, Bates College registrar, as Ruth. Katalin Vecsey, senior lecturer and vocal director for theater productions at Bates, is the director.

Bates’ registrar Mary Meserve is an accomplished actress.

Meserve describes the play as “engaging and thought-provoking.” Both Lisa and Ruth are “professional writers, so their passion and commitment must come through strongly” in the actresses’ portrayals, she says. In playing Ruth, Meserve emphasizes the generation gap between her character and Lisa in order to fuel the tension of the play.

Danello says that the play “explores the boundaries of ambition within the borders of an evolving friendship. It’s an intense psychological exploration of a mentor-mentee relationship that calls for a realistic and multilayered performance.”

She hopes the audience will feel compassion for the two women, noting that “one of the central issues in the play is which character, if either, is in the right. At the end, will the audience sympathize with Lisa or Ruth?”

Danello, a double major in English and theater, has undertaken this role in fulfillment of an independent study in theater. She is a theatrical triple threat: actor, stage manager and director. She has acted in several mainstage productions at Bates, including Hotel Universe, The Learned Ladies and Bus Stop. Danello is also involved in Bates’ student-run theater organization, the Robinson Players.

In preparing to portray Lisa, Danello researched the play’s cultural references and time period as well as relationships between professors and students. Danello describes her character as realistic, with her anxiety and insecurity, but also manifesting a “vivacious sparkle.” Danello’s biggest challenge in her rehearsals has been representing the passage of time between the scenes as the action progresses through the years.

Meserve describes theater as a passion and says, “it is simply part of who I am and I can’t imagine not being involved either onstage or behind the scenes.” She got her start as a child in community and local productions around Portland, and worked as a young adult behind the scenes at Portland Stage Company for two years.

In the last 15 years, she has performed and directed at various theaters around southern Maine, such as Lyric Music Theater, Portland Players and Community Little Theater. Meserve also performed in the Bates production of A Lie of the Mind in 2008.

The three-in-one play Bash by Neil LaBute, a writer and director critically acclaimed for his bleak, blunt view of human relations, is the vehicle for performances by four Bates College students at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 1, and Saturday and Sunday, April 3 and 4, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Admission is free. For more information, please contact 207-786-6161.

Bash is an evening-length work composed of three short plays: “Iphigenia in Orem,” “A Gaggle of Saints,” and “Medea Redux.” Katalin Vescey, lecturer in theater and the college’s vocal coach, directs the production, which fulfills a requirement for the performers’ independent studies in performance.

The performers are Rory Cosgrove, a junior from Prospect, Pa.; Drew Gallagher, a junior from Lowell, Mass.; Caroline Servat, a senior from San Francisco; and Marielle Vigneau-Britt, a senior from Canton, Conn.

The plays depict essentially good Latter-day Saints doing disturbing and violent things. “I purposefully directed these plays on a bare stage, with harsh lighting and with no movement on stage at all,” says Vecsey, “because the power is in the text, in the voice and in the character performances.”

Bash comprises two monologues and one scene with two actors. Essentially, it’s made up of edgy and provocative 40-minute soliloquies in which the characters directly address a silent interlocutor. Ben Brantley of The New York Times describes his experience of the plays as “a transfixing evening.”

“Solo performances present a great challenge to any actor,” Vescey says. “I pushed my students really hard with these texts.

“It was worth it. I feel honored to be part of this semester-long independent-study project because LaBute’s characters on stage became brutally real.”

Kelly Cox ’11

Tossing and turning on a simple purple couch, Lillian Sullivan ’10 delivers an ode to a pizza man.

Rhythmically transforming from needy hopelessness to frantic desire, Sullivan takes her character to extremes. She prattles to the audience in iambic pentameter as she displays her dramatic talent in an intimate 18-by-20-foot space.

Sullivan, an anthropology major from Telluride, Colo., performed Three In One, a set of three monologues by three very different characters, Dec. 1-3 in Bates’ Black Box Theater. It was her solo debut on stage after years of performing improv comedy with the student troupe Strange Bedfellows.

The performance culminated an independent study in theater, in which she is minoring. Wishing to create her own production and stretch her acting range, Sullivan designed her course of study in consultation with a faculty advisor.

“I wanted to be able to do theater while incorporating my strengths and creativity from improv,” Sullivan explains.

The monologues were chosen by lecturer in theater Katalin Vecsey, who is faculty advisor to the Bedfellows and was Sullivan’s independent study advisor. As president of the Bedfellows, Sullivan has had ample experience in comedy, and Vecsey helped her round out her abilities through the more serious monologue set.

The monologues began with “House” by Ruth Margraff, about a woman who calls a clothing company to inquire about an item she admires in their catalog. “My Mother’s Eyes” by Jamie Pachino depicted a 25-year-old woman who inherits her father’s terminal kidney disease. The closer was “Pizza Apostrophe,” Katerine Catmull’s monologue by the needy but indecisive woman who longs for a delivery man.

Sullivan took her academic career into her own hands through the independent study, developing a unique program that would address her learning needs and her theatrical growth areas. “This course strengthened my willingness to perform pieces that I may have been indifferent to,” she adds.

“[Vecsey] was great at instructing me in areas for improvement, instilling an awareness of movement, providing honest feedback and fostering stronger control. The theater department was also exceedingly accommodating to any desire I had in envisioning this performance.”

Vecsey enjoys mentoring students in independent studies. “Working one-on-one with a student throughout an entire semester allows me to focus on developing and improving specific skills,” she says, “digging more into their creativity and pushing them really hard to do well.”

After graduation, Sullivan plans to take classes at The Second City in Chicago, the nationally acclaimed and influential improv company.

Jason Tsichlis, a composer and Bates College senior, premieres his Mass in D-flat Major on May 21. The concert is open to the public at no cost.

A setting for sacred texts from the Liber Usualis, a collection of commonly used Gregorian chants, the mass is written for an unaccompanied mixed choir. Tsichlis will conduct the performance, making the event a double debut for this student from Winchester, Mass.

An art and visual culture major, Tsichlis composed the four-movement mass as an independent study, working with John Corrie, director of the Bates College Choir and artistic director of the Maine Music Society. “I naturally chose to write a mass because of the form’s important role in the history of Western choral music,” Tsichlis says.

Stylistically, the piece reflects specific composers more than any broad genre such as Romanticism. “I draw on composers such as the Renaissance masters Palestrina and Lasso, and then Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, Chopin, Debussy and Biebl,” he says. “Two specific pieces I found quite influential are Mozart’s Requiem in D minor and Schubert’s Mass in G major.”

The 18 singers will include members of the college choir and of three Bates a cappella groups, the Merimanders, the Deansmen and the Manic Optimists.

• Thursday, May 21, at 8:30 p.m.
• Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. FMI: 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu