Joey Guerra
Entertainment Editor
As is the case with countless songs, movies and, in this instance, plays, love is indeed what makes the world go round.
William Hanley's Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, the second main-stage offering this semester from the University of Houston School of Theatre, looks at the magic love works in the sobering tale of three characters brought together by separate fates. It's a journey junior theater major Je'Caryous Johnson seems fully prepared for.
"I think the show is about three groups of people that happen to meet up in this one particular store. Each of the three has their own problems, but as they learn throughout the course of the show, they're different people telling almost the same story in a sense," Johnson said of the play, in which his character has recently killed his mother and is fleeing from the police. "It's a tragedy, but it's not a tragedy. That's very interesting."
Sophmore theater major Karen Heimbaugh, who plays Rosie, a tough Brooklyn girl, agrees.
"A lot of lessons are learned between the three that you wouldn't think would be learned in that situation," she said.
Through the course of the play each of the characters' fronts crumbles, revealing emotions that have long been locked away. It's a process Johnson was intrigued with.
"He puts on a facade, a front, as being this stereotypical black kid of the 1960s," Johnson said. "Talks in slang and lingo because that's the way that everybody expected him to be, since he was black."
In truth, Johnson's character is a genius. His actions, though, stem out of desperation.
"He's killed his mother because of the absence of love in his life," Johnson said.
Heimbaugh added that her character also does some soul-searching in order for her facade to come down.
"Rosie has her tough, Brooklyn-girl front because she's real ugly, so she's had to put that wall up - 'Nobody can hurt me. If I laugh at myself, nobody can laugh at me and hurt me,'" Heinbaugh said of her character.
The play is directed by faculty member Sidney Berger, whom Heimbaugh said chose her for a very specific reason.
"He picked me, not just because of my fabulous acting ability, I don't believe, but he said it was because Rosie is me," Heinbaugh said, "which I've been told is even harder to play because you have to be yourself onstage, and that's really hard."
"It took me a long time to stop acting and just let some of myself, a lot of myself, come through because it's very embarrassing to be up onstage. It's like being naked or something."
In the midst of all the soul searching, though, is still the most human emotion of them all.
"The one thing that you will learn by seeing this show is that the most important in life is love," Johnson said. "I realized by doing this character that everything we do, every move we make, every thought we think, is done with some kind of love involved."
Performances of Slow Dance on the Killing Ground are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Lyndall Finley Wortham Theatre, Entrance 16 off Cullen Blvd. Call (713) 743-2929 for more information.