The Bates College theater department presents Philip Barry’s 1929 comedy-drama Hotel Universe as its fall production in performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Monday, Nov. 5, 6 and 8; and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 6 and 7, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Tickets cost $6 for the general public and $3 for seniors and non-Bates students. They are available at www.batestickets.com. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz directs the play by the early 20th-century playwright Barry, known best for The Philadelphia Story, which was made into an effervescent 1940 film featuring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. While retaining the keen social commentary and wit that distinguishes Barry’s best work, Hotel Universe steers the comedy-of-manners format into serious territory, exploring its characters’ disappointments and disillusionments.

The play unfolds in the summer of 1929 in France as Ann Field, who has been caring for her elderly father, physicist Stephen Field, is visited by friends she hasn’t seen in years. As the story progresses, the Fields and their guests reveal more and more about their intertwined and complicated relationships and other issues. Flashbacks, dreams and discussions expose each character’s struggles with love, happiness, expectations and morality.

Kuritz calls Hotel Universe a great acting opportunity. “The play challenges everyone to find a unique performance style,” he says.

The cast includes two seniors who are working on honors theses in acting: Tim Fox of Framingham, Mass., who plays Tom Ames, and Drew Gallagher of Lowell, Mass., who plays Pat Farley. Other cast members are seniors Rory Cosgrove of Prospect, Pa., portraying Stephen Field; Schuyler Rooth of New Orleans as Ann Field; Alina Volobuyeva of Kharkiv, Ukraine, as Hope Ames; Singha Hon of New York, as Lily Malone; Sam Metzger of Wellesley Hills,  Mass., as Norman Rose; Lisa Danello of Washington D.C., as Alice Kendall; and Tessa Hathaway of Pittsfield, Maine, as Felice.

Students in the Bates course “Acting and Directing for the Camera” screen their class projects on April 3. The projects are scenes adapted from well-known motion pictures such as Armageddon, 28 Days Later, Juno, Bridget Jones’ Diary and American Beauty.

The screening also includes senior-thesis films by Rachael Garbowski of Brussels, Wis., and Rufat Hasanov of Baku, Azerbaijan, as well as films produced in the “Digital Film Production” course. That course and “Acting and Directing for the Camera” are taught by Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz, a member of Bates’ theater faculty since 1978.

• Friday, April 3, at 4 p.m.
• Pettigrew Hall, Filene Room (Room 301), 305 College St.

For Sulo Dissanayake ’09, the pitfalls of filmmaking came into focus when, for the course “Acting and Directing for the Camera,” she directed a scene at the Blue Goose — and then pretty much had to scrap it.

Paul Kuritz, a theater professor who is advancing film production in Bates’ curriculum, assigned the 12 students in the course to adapt and shoot a scene from a feature film. Dissanayake chose a pivotal encounter from Neil LaBute’s 2003 movie The Shape of Things. This being a wintertime course, Dissanayake brought LaBute’s outdoor scene inside, to a barroom.

“I thought the Goose would be ideal,” she says, and the management was agreeable. However, as Dissanayake explains, “I didn’t expect half the town to be at the bar on a Saturday morning. So our audio got completely screwed,” as bar hubbub obscured the actors’ dialogue.

She ended up shooting the scene on a set on campus.

Kuritz’s students in Theater 371 chose source films worthy of any Netflix queue, from the classic (Rebel Without a Cause) to the hip and funny (This Is Spinal Tap) to the teeth-clenching (Misery). As directors, they had to do it all, from logistics to running the digital video camera to guiding the actors, who were also taking the course.

Kuritz has taught Theater 371 twice. He prepared himself by taking film production courses at the Rockport, Maine, school now called the Maine Media Workshops, and made his own short in 2006. (Premiered this year, A New Life will be shown at this summer’s Bayou City Inspirational Film Festival in Texas.)

Film studies is well-established in Bates’ curriculum, and the late rhetoric professor Robert Branham taught documentary filmmaking in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, after a gap of a decade and thanks largely to Kuritz, film production is again a fixture. Since January, theater majors who meet a variety of requirements, including Theater 371 and programs off campus, have been able to work toward a senior thesis in narrative film production.

The time is ripe, Kuritz says. “More people watch films and make films than watch or make theater.”

Continuity was a key lesson, explains Lana Smithner ’10, who aimed high for her project and chose a scene from the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. For instance, as she moved the camera to capture different angles, she had to shift the set and the actors, too, so they would appear to stay in the same places.

Similarly, actors must be able to play a scene exactly the same way through different shots so that they all fit together in the editing room. “Everyone thinks that acting for the camera, you can be more natural and real,” Smithner says.

“But the big thing that we learned right off was, it’s actually the opposite, because the way shots are composed is very fake.”

Illustration by Marty Braun

Paul Kuritz, professor of theater, directs the Bates College theater department production of The Contrast, an American comedy of manners written in 1787 by Royall Tyler. Performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 9, 10, 16 and 17, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 11 and 18, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 2 Andrews Road.

Admission is $6 general admission, and $3 Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens, and non-Bates students. For more information, please call 207-786-6161 or visit the Bates online box office.

The Contrast is considered the first professionally performed play written by a North American. The “contrast” of the title, Kuritz explains, lies in “a phenomenon that has continued to this day. A certain segment of Americans wish America were more like Europe in many different ways, and another segment of Americans thanks God that we are different from Europeans in precisely those same ways.”

A comedy of manners set in post-Revolution America, it depicts a romantic conundrum centering around the character Dimple, a suitor who must choose among three women. Charlotte Manly is a fashionable woman who loves to gossip that Dimple wants her for her beauty; Letitia is a wealthy lady that Dimple considers for her dowry; and Maria is Dimple’s betrothed and an old family friend.

When Charlotte’s brother, the rough-and-ready Henry Manly, arrives and falls for Maria, the stage is set for an evening of merriment.

Tyler was a Revolutionary War veteran, Maine lawyer and eventually the chief justice of Vermont’s Supreme Court. The play satirizes all things British, though it’s written in a British style.

Kuritz edited the play for length and now-obscure historical references. Several costumes in the production, he notes, are on loan from Colonial Williamsburg.

But the central themes of the piece continue to be relevant, he says. “It’s about people being lured by fashion, in their thinking and dress, to their dismay and possible ruin. The character Colonel Manley, in fact, warns that nations and societies might also succumb to such lures.”

Kuritz is the author of a just-published book, The Fiery Serpent (Winepress), that sets forth a contemporary Christian theory of theater. “Theories of dramatic theater include classic theory, neoclassical theory, romantic theory, psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, postmodern theory, etc.,” he says.

But not since the early Christian advocate Tertullian, he says, “has an attempt been made to frame a coherent Christian theory of the dramatic arts of theater and film. My book takes a stab at filling that void.”

Using Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Elia Kazan’s powerful film On the Waterfront as examples, Kuritz posits a standard for film and theater that reflects the model God put forth in Creation. He asks, “What is the true purpose of the arts?” and “How is good theater presented?”

Local retailers carrying the book include the Bates College Store, in Chase Hall, Campus Avenue, and the Bible Bookstore on Center Street, Auburn.

Author of three well-regarded books on acting and theatrical history, Kuritz in recent years has studied filmmaking and film directing at the International Film and Digital Video Workshops in Rockport. “A New Life” will serve to test his abilities as part of the process of developing a new Bates course on acting and directing for the camera.

“More people watch films and make films than watch or make theater,” he says. “More students are interested in film, in how to make films. So I think I should take my knowledge and skill in directing for theater and see how it can be shifted over to film.”

Brown, author of the short story that Kuritz has adapted for the film, was born in 1917 and is a lifelong Alabaman. She uses understated language and minimal word counts to achieve a surprising eloquence in her explorations of the culture clash between the old and new South. “A New Life” was published in the 1986 collection “Tongues of Flame,” which won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award.

The story of a young widow whose grief drives her to seek comfort from a group of Christians, “A New Life” lent itself readily to screen adaptation, Kuritz says. It’s short, with a small number of characters and settings, he explains, and “it’s pretty cinematic in its imagery. There’s a lot of dialogue already, and very vivid but brief character descriptions.”

In addition, the rural Southern setting “translates pretty well to parts of Maine,” he says. “I was looking for a story that could be set realistically in Maine.”

Kuritz will take as his cinematic model the classic Hollywood style of such directors as John Ford, Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock — steady camera work, a measured pace and rich compositions. He will shoot the piece in digital video.

Volunteers are crucial to the production of “A New Life,” for which Kuritz has virtually no budget. The situation is ideal, he says, for “people who like making movies and want to network with a place that will be making movies in the future.”

While Bates has no formal film/video production program and few fiction films have been produced at the college, Bates students and faculty have created a number of documentaries. “For the Love of Small Scale,” a documentary about Maine agriculture created by four Bates students, was one of 10 winners in the 2005 Maine Documentary Film Competition, part of the annual Maine International Film Festival.

Kuritz teaches stage acting and directing at Bates and directs one of the theater department’s two annual productions. In fall 2005 he directed “The Taming of the Shrew,” and his previous directorial projects include the musical “Swingtime Canteen” (2004), Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” (2002) and a stage adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (2001).

A Lewiston resident, he is the author of “Fundamental Acting: A Practical Guide” (Applause Theatre Books, 1997), “The Making of Theatre History” (Prentice Hall, 1987) and “Playing: An Introduction to Acting” (Prentice Hall, 1982).

Often viewed as playwright John Guare’s most popular and important work, The House of Blue Leaves is the major fall theater production of the Bates College theater department. Directed by Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz, “Blue Leaves” will be performed at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, Nov. 5-6 and 12-13, and at 2 p.m. on Sundays, Nov. 7 and 14.

Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-Bates students. For reservations and information, please call the box office at 207-786-6161.

Mixing black comedy with existential drama, The House of Blue Leaves premiered off-Broadway in February 1971. It’s built around the historic visit to New York City by Pope Paul VI on October 4, 1965, and examines the human condition and the falsities of the American Dream through the lens of a middle-class New York family.

The plot deals with the pains and hardships of protagonist Artie as he juggles his often-crazy home life and his desire to make it big as a songwriter. In the Bates production, Artie will be played by Kevin Weiler, a senior from Anchorage, Alaska. Alexandra Hughes, a sophomore from Brookline, Mass., portrays his wife, Bananas. Brandt Miller, a first-year student from Westfield, N.J., plays their son Ronnie, and Emmy Spencer, a first-year from Canaan, Maine, is Bunny, Artie’s mistress.

The play, says Kuritz, “forces the questions, ‘Why is this family as it is?’ ‘Why is my family the way it is?’ ”

He says, “Fundamental to any actor playing a role is the question, ‘What does my character want and what is he willing to do to get it?’ That question animates the characters in ‘The House of Blue Leaves,’ and returns to each of us throughout our lives.”

Blue Leaves” has received critical acclaim for its examination of the American family and the American way of life. It has been awarded a variety of prizes including four Tony Awards, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award and the New York Drama Critics Award for Best American Play.

In the annual spring production by the Bates College theater department, Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz directs the World War II-era musical Swingtime Canteen in performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 11-13, and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14.

Admission is $6 for the public and $3 for Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-Bates students. The performance is free to Bates students and WWII veterans. Performances will be held in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College Avenue.

Written by Linda Thorsen Bond, William Repicci and Charles Busch, Swingtime Canteen is inspired by the films and personalities of the 1940s that reflected the state of mind behind the U.S. war effort against the Axis Powers in World War II. It premiered in 1995 and tallied more than 300 performances off Broadway, earning The New York Times’ description “a pleasure.” It has been performed all over the United States, in Canada and in London.

This upbeat, interactive play follows movie legend Marian Ames and her friends from the Hollywood Canteen while they put together a musical act to entertain the troops in London in 1943. Music abounds as these archetypal film characters of the 1940s sing more than 30 vintage classics from those heady years, including: “Don’t Fence Me In,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Sing, Sing Sing,” “How High The Moon,” “I Don’t Want To Walk Without You,” and a 12-song Andrews Sisters medley.

Audience members become the troops at a canteen show, and at least one viewer can expect to find himself on stage dancing along with the actors.

Director Kuritz chose the play for both its musical content and emphasis on female roles, which provided a nice contrast with the male-dominated production of Hamlet last fall.

Although the play has the potential to make war look rosy, Kuritz insists his production makes no such statement. “The challenge, the great temptation, is to make a comment about the current war,” he says. Kuritz has tried to resist this temptation, choosing to let the audience decide for themselves by creating a performance that makes available “every possible point of view.”

The entertainment community’s response to World War II was markedly different from the current situation, he says, “and the question people can think about is, why?”

Victoria Stubbs, of Poland, Maine, is guest musical director for the production, working here through the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at Bates. Stubbs has worked with Mad Horse Theater and teaches at the Portland Art and Technology High School. She has been vital in helping students master the close harmonies of the Andrews Sisters medley, Kuritz says.

For reservations or more information about the Bates College production of Swingtime Canteen, call 207-786-6161.

Admission is $6 for the public and $3 for Bates faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-Bates students. The performance is free to Bates students and WWII veterans. Performances will be held in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College Avenue.

Written by Linda Thorsen Bond, William Repicci and Charles Busch, Swingtime Canteen is inspired by the films and personalities of the 1940s that reflected the state of mind behind the U.S. war effort against the Axis Powers in World War II. It premiered in 1995 and tallied more than 300 performances off Broadway, earning The New York Times’ description “a pleasure.” It has been performed all over the United States, in Canada and in London.

This upbeat, interactive play follows movie legend Marian Ames and her friends from the Hollywood Canteen while they put together a musical act to entertain the troops in London in 1943. Music abounds as these archetypal film characters of the 1940s sing more than 30 vintage classics from those heady years, including: “Don’t Fence Me In,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Sing, Sing Sing,” “How High The Moon,” “I Don’t Want To Walk Without You,” and a 12-song Andrews Sisters medley.

Audience members become the troops at a canteen show, and at least one viewer can expect to find himself on stage dancing along with the actors.

Director Kuritz chose the play for both its musical content and emphasis on female roles, which provided a nice contrast with the male-dominated production of Hamlet last fall.

Although the play has the potential to make war look rosy, Kuritz insists his production makes no such statement. “The challenge, the great temptation, is to make a comment about the current war,” he says. Kuritz has tried to resist this temptation, choosing to let the audience decide for themselves by creating a performance that makes available “every possible point of view.”

The entertainment community’s response to World War II was markedly different from the current situation, he says, “and the question people can think about is, why?”

Victoria Stubbs, of Poland, Maine, is guest musical director for the production, working here through the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at Bates. Stubbs has worked with Mad Horse Theater and teaches at the Portland Art and Technology High School. She has been vital in helping students master the close harmonies of the Andrews Sisters medley, Kuritz says.

For reservations or more information about the Bates College production of Swingtime Canteen, call 207-786-6161.

Paul Kuritz, a professor of theater at Bates, directs the production. First performed in 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan established Wilde’s reputation as a social satirist and master of the bon mot. The story of a self-righteous upper-class woman’s flirtation with social self-destruction, the play revealed Wilde’s keen eye for irony and hypocrisy, and his flair for clever repartee and pithy epigrams.

The suspicion that Lord Windermere is dallying with the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne, an older woman of questionable character, sends Lady Windermere bolting from her accustomed position on the moral high ground. She sets her eye on the charming Lord Darlington, but is yanked back from the brink of disaster by Mrs. Erlynne, who sacrifices her own reputation to save Lady Windermere’s. In so doing, Mrs. Erlynne, whose motherly protectiveness is not coincidental, personifies the distinction between social propriety and true morality.

In the Bates production, Lord Windermere is portrayed by Alex Smith, a first-year student from South Portland. Playing Lady Windermere is Alixandra Liiv, a sophomore from New York City. Lord Darlington is played by Kevin Weiler, a sophomore from Anchorage, Alaska, and the part of Mrs. Erlynne is performed by Julie Hammond, a senior from Tacoma, Wash.

For more information, call the theater department box office at 207-786-6161

Boasting an original score and a design scheme out of Buck Rogers, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s social satire “Brave New World” opens the Bates College theater season.

With a student cast, this stage adaptation of Huxley’s novel is directed by Paul Kuritz, professor of theater. Performances are in Schaeffer Theatre at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, Nov. 8-10, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 11. Admission is $6 for adults and $3 for seniors, children and full-time students.

Written in 1931, Huxley’s famous novel envisions a future society locked into conformity, a caste system and mass production — including the assembly-line bioengineering of human beings. Loyalty to the social order has replaced romantic, familial and spiritual bonds. To ensure tranquillity the government promotes such superficial pleasures as promiscuous sex, the use of mood-mellowing drugs and consumer consumption.

The resulting disconnect between contentment and fulfillment drives the plot, as the leading characters – notably John “the Savage,” played by Andrew Akre, of the Bates Class of 2003 – martyr themselves to the cause of individuality.

Based on David Rogers’ stage adaptation, the Bates production reflects Huxley’s intention in a number of ways. For example, says Kuritz, at the players’ request he adapted material from Huxley to shift the dramatic climax from John’s suicide, where Rogers has it, back to the debate between John and the “Director,” a ruling bureaucrat portrayed by sophomore Ronald Smith.

Moreover, Kuritz says, the production emphasizes the novel’s bleak humor. “It’s very funny,” he says. “People won’t know whether to take it seriously or not.”

Finally, the production aims to simulate how the future could have seemed to people of the 1930s, when technology and mass communications were redefining Western culture. Kuritz calls the production’s acting style a kind of exaggerated “heroic realism.” Ellen Seeling, assistant professor of theater, has designed sets and costumes that evoke fanciful 1930s high tech à la Buck Rogers.

Even the music commissioned for the production creates a “retro-futuristic” effect. The composer is Alison Reid, of Boston, who does business as Treble Cove Music and writes primarily for stage and television. Reid looked to two avant-garde composers of the 1930s, Edgar Varese and George Antheil, for inspiration. Both sought to reflect the sounds of a technological society in their work (to the extent that Antheil even used airplane propellers in his “Ballet Mechanique.”)

Reid’s score also uses a theremin, whose eerie keening is familiar from countless scary B-movies and the Beach Boys’ hit “Good Vibrations.”

“Trying to figure out ways to aurally represent the future as seen from the ’30s was very much in my line of thinking and a great deal of fun,” Reid says.

Sixty years into the future, “Brave New World” is a cautionary tale as pertinent as when Huxley wrote it – if not more so, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in September. A central theme of the novel is the precariousness of the balance between freedom and security. Nowadays, as the nation considers ways to prosecute and protect itself from terrorists, “that debate is the one that’s going on in everyone’s mind,” says Kuritz, and it resonates in the debate between the Director and John the Savage. He says the question is, “How much are you willing to trade for security and happiness?”

For more information, please call 207-786-6161