Off-Offstage: “This is stagecraft. Goodbye”

Sophie Katherine Serafim relives the horrors of the HSC.

SUDS’ Off-Offstage embodies amateur attitude with affection, but also a biting accuracy that alludes to a dark past with school theatre. As we took our seats, it became apparent that the set embodied this same sentiment.

As someone cornered into writing heavy-handedly thematic pieces for the HSC in a mad attempt to ensure the marker didn’t “miss anything,” these skits resonated with me. Off-Offstage acknowledges this with its characters’ confessions in the dark that they are out of their depth, that they will never amount to anything, that they didn’t even write their own work.

It says a lot about the charisma of the cast that, despite deliberately playing their characters as obnoxiously as possible, you still find yourself rooting for them. They are caricatures, but it makes them all the more real, because the HSC makes caricatures of us all.

The show wraps up with what the snarky narrator describes derisively as a full circle plot. In this way, the love/ hate relationship between the writers, cast and the backstage team of school theatre is tangible from start to finish. Hatred is there in all those times a “stagehand” gleefully tested the lights, plunging the audience into pitch black before we even entered the room. Love is there too, because how else would everyone have had so much fun?

Arracket: “MILFs. Sandworms. Love triangles”

Mali Lung heads to the theatre.

Co-writers Bella Wellstead and Amelia Vogelsang’s promise of “salacious fanfiction” in their original work for SUDS’ Summer Season drew me inand this duo delivered just that.

As we shuffled into the Cellar Theatre we entered the homely bedroom of Danny Cabubas’ Y/N, only to spend the next half hour in absolute silence.

Directed by Wellstead, Arracket’s first act follows Y/N silently reading