Tessa Jillson
Staff Writer
As the lights went off and the crowd grew silent co-stage manager and senior Tess Irving and director junior James Buonopane introduced the show.
“Viewer discretion is advised,” Buonopane said.
The Hilltop Players presented David Ives’s collection of comedic short plays, “All in the Timing,” on Thursday night. The show will run until Dec. 10.
The first play, “Sure Thing,” featured a young lady named Betty, played by sophomore Marielle Scoire, and a gentleman named Bill, played by senior Anthony Gabrielle.
In the opening scene, the two had conversation that was reset by a ringing bell each time one of them made a mistake.
Gabrielle portrays Bill as a conIdent men who forwardly asked Betty if he can sit next to her. Each time Betty said no, the bell was rung and the conversation got incrementally more aggressive. Until the final repetition in which they came to an understanding.
The performance ended with Betty and Bill falling in love.
“Words, Words, Words” was the next play featuring an optimistic monkey named Milton, played by sophomore Adam Tackes, a pessimistic monkey named Swift, played by junior Andrew Carten and a practical monkey named Kafka, played by sophomore Timothy McDonnell.
The play told the story of three monkeys in captivity with nothing but a set of typewriters in front of them. The trio acted on all fours. Tackes played the calm and collected monkey, while Carten ran around on a rampage and McDonnell swung around a banana.
The following play was “The Universal Language, ” in which Junior Matt Banks played a scam artist named Don in. He fiercely strutted the stage teaching his own made up vocabulary to a girl named Dawn, played by Scoire.
Banks made the crowd laugh by acting like a strict high school language teacher. The dialogue nonetheless made sense to the audience, as Banks gestured toward certain objects while speaking in a made-up language comprised of Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French.
Cast member Tackes said he liked all the plays but especially “The Universal Language.”
“It’s like nonsense,” Tackes said, “but you can kind of tell what they mean, it’s like English gibberish”
Scoire stuttered on stage as her character Dawn. The character almost caused the crowd shed a tear with the line, “Most of my life has been a long pause.”
“The Philadelphia” was a play about two friends, Al, played by senior Ben McNally and Mark, played by freshman Danielle Amanita who got stuck in different areas as a result of an unexplainable black hole which trapped them in “The Philadelphia.” In this alternate reality, Philadelphia is represented as a place where one never gets what they want.
McNally, whose character was at first trapped in “the Los Angeles” and was granted good luck as a result, stomped o. the stage when he received a cheesesteak and realized Amanita’s character, Mark, sucked him into “The Philadelphia.”
The last play called the “Variations on the Death of Trotsky” depicted Leon Trotsky, played by senior Zac Lambert, who hears about his death in a 2016 encyclopedia read by his wife Mrs. Trotsky, played by senior Rachel Lyon.
The play was a handful of different scenarios which took place the day of Trotsky’s death. Lambert, who wore a fake axe propped onto his head, “died” in his chair whenever a scene would end and the next would start.
Junior Lily Packer, who played Trotsky’s killer, Roman received the most laughs from the crowd and even had a makeout session with Mrs. Trotsky on stage before one of Trotsky’s last death scenes.
Sophomore Cam Raia said, “I love the playwright to pieces. ... Every character in this show requires so much energy.”