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Life & Arts

Heavy audience participation ruled the stage at local play

Student-produced drama featured crowd-pleasing ridiculous plots and flamboyant, zany characters

by CAITLIN CUPPERNULL 
The Daily Cougar 

For those who remember curling up in a corner of the library with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, quietly turning the pages while creating your own destiny, Greg Hundemer and Timmy Wood's Choose Your Own Play may not elicit the same peaceful feeling. Although the instructions are similar, the play didn't offer the wholesome twists and turns found in the popular children's books.

Instead, the audience was led through the story by a whisky drinking, suit-wearing, vulgar "gentleman," played by Wood, one of the writers of the play.

Hundemer, Wood's co-writer, played a "creepy playwright" in the audience, whose demanding questions allowed Wood to go over the rules: At certain points throughout the play, the main character "You," played by Jared Doreck, will be faced with two options. Wood, the emcee, will then ring a bell and ask the audience to choose between the two, which resulted in audience members trying to scream their choice louder than the person sitting next to them. Wood settled on a selection and the play proceeded, but not without him dropping numerous curse words and taking a swig from his ever-present Jack Daniels.

Doreck portrayed "You" in the form of an awkward young man who often stumbles on his words. The audience's relationship with the actor was summed up at the start of the play, with the announcement that if he gets hurt, you get hurt; if he has sex, you have sex; and if he dies, you die. Although the plot frequently left him pantless and heartbroken, Doreck's acting stayed strong.

Throughout the adventure you meet secret agents, lose your fiancée, try to save a gay grizzly bear and perform in a Spanish policemen's ball with a dead woman. At least, those were some of the stories from this particular Friday night. With so many options and potential twists, the audience could have seen all of these situations, or none of them depending on the night. 

"It took us almost over a year to write this and it's like 450 pages long, so it's a lot.

Not one choice leads to the same ending. Every one is different," Wood said.

The cast was made up of Paul Salazar, Alex Dorman, Allison Chandler and Caleb George. Each has about 20 characters listed under their name in the playbill. Wearing simple black clothes, the actors easily morphed into whichever the story line calls for, occasionally accompanied by a prop or additional piece of clothing to represent that character. 

While the performance had the potential to be confusing with so few actors playing so many people, their foreign accents and over-the top, yet hilarious, acting made clear distinctions between characters.

The play began with You sleeping in your apartment, being woken up by a ringing phone and someone knocking on your door setting up the first choice you need to make. The minimal set design a couch, table with a television, stack of books, phone and refrigerator allowed the audience to create their surroundings with imagination, which is what choosing your own adventure is all about.

After going through the first 20 or 30-minute act, the scene reset and the audience was faced again with the initial decision of answering the phone or the door. Following an intermission, in which Wood handed out condoms and candy, the scene reset for a third time, thus beginning the adventure again.

Although it was interesting to see how so many stories come from the original scene, it would have been more fun to spend the allotted time on one adventure, seeing just how many turns it can take.

Wood and Hundermer had every possible plot twist scripted, but said they allow the actors a lot of freedom. 

"We never asked (the actors) to be word-for-word, and a lot of the actors we hired, some were from the comedy troop I started and some of the others are trained improvisers, so they're actors that if something comes up they can go with the flow," Wood said.

Laden with absurd situations and an enormous variety of entertaining characters, Choose Your Own Play left the audience with the desire to go back each night and live out a new, albeit completely improbable, adventure. The play gave its last performance Sunday in UH's Jose Quintero Lab Theatre, but Wood and Hundemer said they plan to tighten up the script and send it off to other cities with the hope that it will show again.
 

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