Director Minnie Goode said she wants to leave University students something to think about when she’s gone. An advertisement for her final theater project, “Holy Shit! Here We Go…,” states that the play “will leave you screaming, ‘What the hell did I just see?’”
The explanation Goode was willing to give about what the audience will see was vague. She said she wanted to work with the idea of bringing two separate plots together.
The show consists of two pairs: Amanda Dumler/Kirsten Schmieding and Curtis Williams/Jana Schmieding. The scenes with Jana Schmieding and Williams were summed up by Goode: “They meet, fall in love and comedy ensues.” Dumler explained her scenes with Kirsten Schmieding as “meeting each other for the first time in every scene.” The pairs alternate each scene, which will seem to the audience like flipping channels between two simultaneous television shows.
This is all, if not more than, the cast knew when Goode chose them for their parts at the end of the summer. The play was only a skeleton of key plot points developed by Goode to move the action of the play forward. Everything else was up in the air.
Kirsten Schmieding, Jana’s sister, said it was unorthodox being cast for a show where there weren’t any lines scripted. The cast’s benefit for their faith influenced the way the play unfolds.
“Each person owns so much of the show because we had a hand in creating it,” said Jana Schmieding.
Williams said he is also pleased with the end result but initially had some reservations about the play.
“It’s a little scary because you’re starting from scratch,” Williams said. “But it becomes really interesting after awhile.”
One of Goode’s ideas in creating the show was that the cast would create the characters’ personalities either based on someone they knew or something within themselves. But the actors agreed that by the time the show begins today, the characters will be entirely their own.
“We brought (the characters) to the show,” Dumler said.
Goode said she is confident in the quality of the product she and her cast have created. But she said the quality of the play is a side effect of the effort they expended in making it.
“I’m not interested in the final product as much as the process,” she said.
The title, “Holy Shit! Here We Go…,” is an expression of how the cast felt about the process, Goode said.
“It started as a joke, but it really speaks for the show,” she said, laughing at the realization.
Dumler added that she wants the audience to come to the show with the same attitude of throwing care to the wind that the title conveys.
The show runs today, Friday and Saturday at 5 p.m. in the Pocket Playhouse in Villard Hall.