College Voice Vol. 96 No. 8

, 15 burst into the lobby, urging attendees to come upstairs "for the meeting." We soon reached the performance space, but anyone who had then been expecting to settle into conventional theater seats-complete with a reassuring degree of physical distance between actors and spectators-would have been sorely disappointed. Instead, the thoroughly disoriented and confused attendees went ahead and took a seat on anyone of the couches, beanbags and thick rugs that surrounded the stage. There were a handful of rows toward the back of the theater that offered up traditional seating, but these were set aside for overflow accommodations in case the performance sold out. Sold out it was, and for good reason. In drawing upon a number of sources for its inspiration and content, 4 Dead in Ohio revealed itself to be a thoroughly cohesive, captivating and moving piece of theater. The actors' identities and realities were constantly in flux, yet their skillful storytelling and emotional honesty always remained crystal clear. At first, the eight-actor ensemble drew us all into the gripping scenario of a fictional, student-run midnight-vigil-cum-support-group taking place three days after the Kent State tragedy. The plot soon thickened, however, as these characters began reading Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes (itself an English translation of Sophocles' classic tragedy Antigone) aloud together in the hope that the play's explorations of rebellion, redemption and the true meaning of justice might start to heal the emotional wounds that the shooting had inflicted upon them. The production incorporated not only these two dramatic texts but also '60s protest songs (both recordings and live performances by the actors), quotations about the Kent State massacre from primary sources and additional dialogue that the ensemble of actors wrote themselves-aU in a tidy, fast-paced seventy-five minutes of action. But, as director David Jaffe related in a post-performance talk between the creative team and the audience, the wide variety of content in the final product represents a mere fraction of aU that they had come up with: "There's so much creativity that isn't even in what you saw." However, Spencer Lutvak ' 16 revealed that this wasn't NEW LONDON. CDNNEOICUT VOLlWIE XCVI· ISSL.E8 HELEN ROLFE STAFF WRITER , When Ishowed up at TansiU Theater to see and usher for a play called 4 Dead in Ohio: Antigone at Kent State, I had little to no idea of what to expect. And neither, it seemed, did …