On a rainy Saturday on Feb. 22 at 6:30 p.m., there was a line of approximately 20 people outside Hope Theatre trying to secure a ticket for University Theatre’s production of “POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.” The show started at 7:30 p.m. and was the second to last performance for a show that began the weekend of Feb. 7.
Nina Bain, a junior neuroscience student at UO, attended the Feb. 22 showing with a friend. “I think it was very powerful that a bunch of girls represented such an important topic,” Bain said. She appreciated how women were in the spotlight of the play and that POTUS’s face was not even in the show.
Throughout the play, there were multiple scenes where the casts ran around on stage, chasing each other and generating many laughs from the audience. With its comedic tone, this play had an energetic impression on many.
While the actors drew the most attention from the audience, what happens on the surface is not the whole story. Costume designers, sound and light crews and stage designers are essential to make a play happen on stage.
Holden Fershee, the lighting designer for the show, uses intentional lighting strategies to guide the viewer’s interpretation of the show. Like other backstage designers, Fershee first reads the script to grasp the story and then thinks about what kind of feeling the scene should evoke.
Fershee’s favorite scene is when one of the characters sings a song on stage toward the end of the play. He dramatized the scene by setting the lights to make the stage look like a concert.
“There are so many people who helped us that the audience doesn’t see,” Annika McNair, the costume designer, said. For example, Ayano Yamada operates the lighting across the entire show every night. Throughout the production, Yamada and her team stand in a room on the second floor where they can see the stage from a window.
Throughout the play and intermission, the playlist, “Bitch Beats,” with songs such as “Roar” by Katy Perry, “Look What You Made Me Do” by Taylor Swift and “Girl on Fire” by Alicia Keys, pulsed through the theatre. Story Arney, the sound designer, created the playlist to keep the audience engaged in the upbeat vibe.
At the end of the production, a panel was held by the faculty and student directory. The panel was made up of seven women from political and leadership roles locally and statewide. State Representative Lisa Fragala and Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson were among those who shared at the panel. Prepared questions were asked to the panelists, and it lasted for an hour.
When the host asked what motivated the panelists to pursue their work, Representative Fragala shared her personal experience growing up in a single-mother household. She shared the struggles her family faced, but more importantly, she shared her realization of the social inequity that her mother confronted as a woman and how it impacted her and her family personally.
The other panelists also shared their “why” to pursue a career in politics and leadership as a woman. Several of them emphasized the importance of encouraging younger generations to pursue their dreams and to “never give up,” as Fragala said.
