Philly Fringe 2017: Berserker Residents and UArts present 'These Terrible Things'

With this production, Justin Jain, David Johnson, and Bradley K. Wrenn complete a residence at UArts' Ira Brind School of Theatre, featuring five student actors plus student designers and crew. In this new comedy, written with David Jacobi and directed by Jack Tamburri, the trio plays experts in the Hillerson Acting System. The System is a fictional philosophy satirizing not only extreme actor training but all overwrought, self-righteous approaches that seek to mold people through arbitrary formulas.

Master class

The five students — Annika Cowles, Tess FitzPatrick, Christian Flynn, Rudy Schreiber, and Julya van der Sloot — are completing the Hillerson training's "exercises to waken the mind and wear it down." The expert trio "Hiller-splain" acting, encouraging their eager disciples to open their invisible "trauma boxes" and probe their personal tragedies. The students are subjected to tricks such as channeling animals to improve their acting; van der Sloot's head-bobbing pigeon is hilarious.

As playfully pompous professors, they lead a mid-show audience talkback — asking us to state our opinions simultaneously, in a chaotic din — and to rate the actors, although the teachers skew the points to favor their preferred pupils.

Lessons learned

The students play outrageously bad scenes and parodies of famous plays and playwrights: for example, Maven Damet's Fuckstick (recognizably David Mamet's profanity-laden Glengarry Glen Ross). "If you can't portray rage," says a Beserker after pushing Schreiber to yell his lines, "try puppets."

These Terrible Things is great fun for all, but especially for people connected to theater in some way, as familiar situations are skewered. The students even spoof Shakespeare in How to Ride a Lady, loosely based on that scene in The Taming of the Shrew in which three men summon their wives in a bet to see which will obey. "Pay attention to the iambic pentameter," they're told, "because it's iambic pentameter, and it's important." Cowles beats out the rhythm and chants her lines, which her teachers applaud.

These Terrible Things is so much fun that its serious themes sneak up on us. The graduates are told to "bottle up your emotions" and solemnly encouraged to let "the bridges you burn light your way." Asked to tell their futures, they predict all-too-likely failure — until they realize, in a stirring finale, how to shape their destinies. Already hilarious, These Terrible Things suddenly surprises us with some terrific things.