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the ARTS & CULTURE PROSPECT.

Theatre Intime’s Freshman One-Act Festival:

‘A Rollicking Success’ By Gabriel Robare Senior Prospect Writer

Theatre Intime’s Freshman One-Act Festival (FOAF), which ran three performances this past weekend, captured what theater does best. Four short plays — each directed, acted, and produced by members of the class of 2025 — consider what it means to live a banal life, how to live in times of crisis, and what the medium of the stage can be. Great art poses more questions than answers. In that respect FOAF was a rollicking success.

“You’re Working the Checkout at Albertsons”

The first show, “You’re Working the Checkout at Albertsons” by Christian St. Croix, is an exercise in absurdism set in a grocery store. Four clerks speak in the second person and describe variously strange and mundane situations, each beginning “You’re working the checkout at Albertsons when …” Sometimes these disparate stories meander into philosophy or romance, dramatic fantasy or hypernormal realism. But the writing — pitched somewhere between “Welcome to Night Vale” and Tennessee Williams — is always matter of fact, painting all the stories in the same light: that of the painfully banal life of a cashier.

The actors, Fatima Diallo ’25, Ian Grimm ’25, Kate Stewart ’25, and John Slaughter ’25, set off the absurdism well. They describe stories in which “you” are the protagonist, and they deliver their lines as if they’re making them up on the spot. We see our stories being built up in front of us. And if there’s a theme through all these stories, it’s of feeling trapped within a basic, thoughtless existence: we watch the actors build cages around themselves through their stories. The play is about escaping banality, or at least desperately trying to find joy in it, both to no avail.

Emily Yang ’25 directs with a light hand: her four actors stay at their tills for essentially the whole of the scene’s 15-minute runtime. This makes the rare moments of movement, like Grimm stepping on his till and yelling “There is a sun!”, a pleasant shock. And playing out the show with “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads — with the refrain “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was” — is a nice touch.

“Joan of Arkansas”

The second show, “Joan of Arkansas” by Sheri Wilner, is a quiet call for hope. In a scene rich with metaphor, we watch two students — Dennis (Harit Raghunathan ’25) and Laura (Nathalie Charles ’25) — study in a library and hold a meandering conversation.

Raghunathan is a contributing puzzles constructor for The Daily Princetonian.

The scene comes to an emotional climax when the conversation finds its way to a grim question: would you rather die or spend your life in prison? Dennis and Laura answer differently, and Raghunathan and Charles each present total certainty in their answers.

The show then shows itself to be a trial of hope: indeed, what is the response to suffering? Is it better to naively hope for the future or practice enlightened cynicism? The actors, under the discerning direction of Daniel Viorica ’25, force us to live in this dichotomy for the show’s length. In doing so, they force us to question our own perspectives. That’s what art should do, and this show does it well.

Viorica is an associate satire editor and The Prospect staff writer for the ‘Prince.’

“A Tale of Two Spectators”

The third show, “A Tale of Two Spectators” by Peter Manos,

COURTESY OF EMILY YANG

Charlie Roth ’25 and Laura Reyes ’25 in Theatre Intime’s Freshman One-Act Festival.

was the best of the bunch, in my opinion. We watch a man (Charlie Roth ’25) and a woman (Laura Reyes ’25) sit on a bench. They, in turn, are watching his wife and her ex-boyfriend, who are having sex in a public park.

Roth is an assistant data editor and staff news writer for the ‘Prince.’

We watch them watching them. Indeed Roth spends most of the show using a pair of opera glasses and staring out into the audience, looking at the adultering pair. Reyes even eats from a bag of popcorn. Roth happened to be looking straight at me in the audience for most of the show — I must have sat where the imaginary couple copulated. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it means to watch others. I was watching theater, and theater was watching me. I was off-put by the actors’ voyeurism, until I realized that I occupied the very same role: what was I doing, sitting in the house, but watching a scene I probably shouldn’t be?

Roth played a low-tier wageworker; Reyes was a down-andout loner trying to bum a smoke. Both of their relationships are, clearly, toast. But somehow these two, brought together by unfortunate circumstance, mesh over their shared plight. Aidan Iacobucci ’25 choreographed the action beautifully: the actors move synchronously, even in small leans and gestures.

Iacobucci is a staff news writer for the ‘Prince.’

Indeed Roth and Reyes together are a revelation. Roth’s realism, dry wit, and nasal deadpan mingle brilliantly with Reyes’s attitude, drama, and determination. They certainly put on a great show of peeping on the couple, but their best bit of acting is when the couple leaves, and they’re left alone. The actors engage in some supremely dry small talk — revealing what animated them all along.

“Medea”

The last show, “Medea” by Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang, is a delectably excessive tangle with the classic. The show reads like a ragtag troupe of actors who read Medea a few years ago and tried to put it together from memory, played to hilarious effect.

It’s a colorful, abstracted collage of a play. Max Peel ’25 plays the lead, strutting around the stage in a mismatched pastel sweater and skirt. There’s a character named “Deus Ex Machina” who says she would have been flown in from the rafters, in a show with a bigger budget. Medea, wrought with guilt, lays down and shouts “I need a creative outlet!” The chorus at one point forgets what show they’re in and starts to perform “The Trojan Woman.”

The show ends — you can’t make this up — in song: a techno version of “Camptown Races” with new lyrics about not killing your kids, complete with party lights and dancing in the aisles.

Was it Euripides’s “Medea”? Of course not. But was it great theater? Absolutely. Titling a play “Medea” gives expectation — pretentious, literary expectation. Wasif Sami ’25 and Le’Naya Wilkerson ’25 direct a “Medea” that refuses to be traditional. It drips with wild élan. It’s the best “Medea” I’ve seen.

Theatre Intime’s season will continue later this month with “A Doll’s House,” Henrik Ibsen’s radical psychological play, directed by Ariel Rockman ’24. It opens Feb. 18.

Gabriel Robare is a Head Puzzles Editor. He is also a Senior Prospect Writer and a Staff News Writer. He can be reached at grobare@princeton.edu or on social at @gabrielrobare.

‘Being a second-generation Indian immigrant doesn’t have to mean letting everything Indian go’

MINHAJ

Continued from page 1 ............. discrimination is illegal, it does still occur both formally and informally.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that caste-based discrimination is real, and it’s not true that it only popped up when the British colonial project began or that it went away when they “left” in the midst of Partition. Of course, British rule exacerbated social antagonisms and codified caste in certain forms of law, but it would be a mistake to say that caste is a thing of the past.

When my parents asked my grandparents for their blessing to get married, the difference in their castes was certainly a topic of discussion. Members of the Dalit caste are still often untouched. Quotas for historically marginalized groups in India are good, but they can’t do the work of reimagining or abolishing social orders. There is no doubt in my mind that if my parents had come from lower castes, it would have been more difficult for them to work in scientific research and pharmaceutical regulation in the United States — and for me to be here.

Saying that engaging in Indo-Pakistani rivalry is evidence of “the British winning” erases experiences like my grandfather’s. In 1947, when the new border between India and Pakistan ran through his home state of Punjab, he had to pick up and move to what was a new nation-state. Plus, we should acknowledge that athletic competition is one of the safer ways for this real geopolitical and interpersonal divide to manifest.

We have to face the fact that Hasan Minhaj, at least as displayed at this week’s Vote100 event, is not for people like me. It only takes a cursory glance at Vote100 publicity to know that it is an overwhelmingly white space.

When I was a Class of 2024 ambassador for Vote100 last year, I found the same to be true. As a small group of dedicated first-years, the other ambassadors and I laid out plans to revolutionize the initiative and have it truly make a difference. For a lot of reasons, our intended plans didn’t pan out.

Voting is cool, but I am skeptical as to how much a University initiative can do to change people’s minds about not participating. The 100 percent student participation in civic engagement is perhaps a noble goal, but with Vote100 itself reporting that Princeton students voted at a rate of 75.4 percent in 2020, I have to say: that might just be good enough.

Now, I have more important things to worry about — I find my energy devoted to organizing with the Pride Alliance and South Asian Progressive Alliance, for example.

When Vote100’s endorsement message and Kevin Kruse’s questions about voting kicked off the event, the indifference in the audience was palpable. Students showed up for Hasan Minhaj: comedian — not Hasan Minhaj: man who might convince me to vote, let’s hear what he has to say.

I really deeply value representation as much as the next guy, so although I am not the biggest fan of Minhaj anymore, I had to go. Watching his comedy special “Homecoming King” five years ago was exhilarating; it seemed to tell the truth about a brown kid’s life in America. The closest I had gotten at that point was Disney Channel, but Ravi on “Jessie” and Baljeet on “Phineas and Ferb” were caricatures and rarely anything more.

But Minhaj the comedian does not represent me. Being a second-generation Indian immigrant doesn’t have to mean letting everything Indian go. In fact, our lives are inextricable from the past, present, and future of that subcontinent, currently the home of a billion and a half breathing people. With them, I hold my breath.

SAM KAGAN / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN