Donning Superman underwear, gold sequins and a striped tie headband, Robert Dowling takes the stage and pulls a face-melting guitar solo out of thin air.
“The thing about it is, anything goes,” the Communication senior said. “If you just believe wholeheartedly that something’s actually in your hands, it’s not really what you’re doing but that you believe you’re doing it.”
“Air Guitar High,” the Theatre and Interpretation Center’s newest mainstage production, is playing April 9-18 in Ethel M. Barber Theater.
Laura Schellhardt, an adjunct lecturer in the theater department, wrote and directed the show and said the plot follows some high school students from Scrug, Iowa who decide to bring big excitement to their small-town lives by entering the U.S. Regional Air Guitar Championships.
Beyond its power chords and riffs though, “Air Guitar High” is also a story about the pressures and demands of high school, she said. As the character “The Voice,” the interviewer for the students’ documentary, confesses at the end, it’s not just a “story about the what.”
“It’s a lot about kids who haven’t really found their niche unexpectedly finding a group of people they can work with,” Schellhardt said.
She added that her inspiration for the show originally came from a documentary called “Air Guitar Nation,” which chronicled the United States’ first appearance in the Air Guitar World Championships in 2005. But that wasn’t the story she said she was interested in telling.
While working with students at The National High School Institute (NHSI) a few years ago, Schellhardt said she decided to write a play combining the experience of high school with America’s developing guilty pleasure-air guitar.
“I had for a long time wanted to write a play that really takes on the energy of high school and the fast-paced nature of it,” she said. “It just occurred to me that writing something about air guitar is not out of place with the high-octane nature of high school.”
Schellhardt originally produced the show with NHSI cherubs, five of whom are now freshman theater majors. Because of their lab requirements, however, they were unable to audition again this year.
“The show has changed quite a bit since the summer; it’s gotten longer,” Schellhardt said. “The students in this production were involved in part of the rewriting process, which was great. It will be nice for the original actors to see a new version of the script.”
Joe Sinopoli, who plays the rival of Dowling’s character, said if nothing else, students and faculty should come see “Air Guitar High” for the intensity.
“I don’t know if it’s in the show, but one of the taglines was ‘all motion, all the time,'” the Communication sophomore said. “It’s very quick moving, fast and rhythmic, so you’re on the edge of your seat the whole time.”
