It’s exactly what you think it is.

Thorny thespian Ross Chapman returns with another Barnard theatre review. Skewer him!

Today is the final day of the Barnard Senior Thesis Festival, where three seniors showed off their directing skills in three very different shows. I chose to see The Serpent, and another Bwogger should tell you about The Crazy Locomotive soon. The Serpent is certainly a showcase for a director, as it’s as subversive a play as you’ll see all year. Directed by Andrea Marquez, this show was more of an experience than a stage production. From the start, something was amiss. As people on stage where getting the set ready (the previous senior thesis play, Woyzeck, had ended ten minutes ago), the members of the cast were mingling with the audience in a noticeably uncomfortable way. They were talking to people who seemed to want privacy and stretching using the chairs of unsuspecting spectators.

Suddenly, drumming started from the stage, which whipped the face-painted actors into a frenzy. For most of the first scene, I had the suspicion that this play was an experiment in making the audience uncomfortable. If you want to see it tonight, you should make sure you’re not too jumpy. Most of the scenes are chronologically independent from each other, but the one structural touchstone is the Bible. The title denotes the serpent from the Garden of Eden, and the story continues (in some manner) from there until the story of Cain and Abel. Even these scenes, though, are hardly literal, and each biblical episode is broken up by other, often angsty scenes.

The Serpent is a product of The Open Theater, which “emphasized the rehearsal as a time and space for questioning, experimentation, and research.” One of the largest changes made as the director and cast questioned the original screenplay was a shift of historical era. The play, originally staged in 1968, uses a scene of the JFK assassination, but this production wanted a more topical cultural moment. They decided to pull in events from Ferguson, in a slightly politicized move that was hard to place in the rest of the play. That is, while the exploration of Ferguson through this play was interesting, the rest of the show would have felt just the same with or without JFK.

As our featured image from The Serpent should tell you, there was a big sexual element to the play. Nearly everything that could be represented sexually was, and some silhouette work made even very innocuous moments feel risque. At times, the sexuality helped make the audience uncomfortable, but it never seemed completely out of place in this modern play. While I hesitate to write this mild spoiler, I think it’s important for people to know, because it might help The Serpent sell one or two more free tickets. When I was in the audience for Joyriders, I heard someone say, “Come to The Serpent, we all orgasm on stage at the same time.” This was the one promise I had going into the show, and I was not disappointed.

The point of The Serpent was hard to grasp, and it should give different meanings to everyone who watches it. Either way, it’s a wonderful showcase for everyone involved. The leader of this senior thesis, director Andrea Marquez, had her hands full with the absurdity of the play, the intensity of action on stage, and the stark contrast in mood between scenes. The actors worked great together, not only as separate characters but as conjoined, divine entities in several scenes. The set was very fun to see, a climbable beam framework which the actors made full use of. The set even dramatically used the curtains from the top of the stage, and the wonderful staging and set design could not have happened the way it did in a more traditional play. The Serpent is free and about 45 minutes long, and I would be deeply surprised if one of the other two senior thesis shows was as weird as this one. Stop by the TIC, pick up your pass, and see what you can get out of The Serpent.