Content Warning: This story contains mentions of suicide.
At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Vertigo Productions released tickets for its spring play “CRAVE; or how to freeze the phantasmagoria.” Two minutes later, all four scheduled performances were sold out.
Performed at Shanley Pavilion April 18 and 19, “CRAVE” was written by Communication senior Lola Bodé. She wrote the project last year as part of her advanced playwriting sequence, a year-long class that allows students to develop a play.
Bodé said she wanted to do something outside of her comfort zone: a horror show.
Her finished product, “CRAVE,” draws on the ethics of incorporating real people into fictional work and Bodé’s experience navigating a breakup.
“As I was writing, these feelings of grief and loss were seeping into the play in ways that felt bigger than just a broken relationship,” Bodé said. “It became more of a meditation on how we confront those feelings.”
“CRAVE” follows three characters: Maeve (Communication senior Dahlia Trilling), Charlie (Communication senior Abraham Deitz-Green) and Anna (Communication sophomore Mila Levit), Maeve’s best friend and Charlie’s girlfriend. The show begins after Anna’s death, at the end of her funeral.
A few years later, Maeve appears at Charlie’s apartment in New York City, the pair having not spoken since Anna’s death. An enraged Maeve has discovered that Charlie has written a memoir about the trio and planned to publish it without telling her.
The show shifts between the past and the present, the written and the imagined; and sometimes, it’s hard to tell which is which. As the cast reenacts what Maeve reads in the memoir, the audience learns more about the trio’s relationship and Anna’s mental health.
Anna, a writer who wrote exclusively in red pen and admired the sun, died by suicide. The show’s horror elements manifest in her ghost. She haunts Charlie’s apartment as he writes the memoir, making herself known through the flickering lights and locked doors.
“While Anna was trapped in Charlie’s apartment and haunting him, she was trapped in what felt like artificial light,” Bodé said. “All that she wanted was to be natural and bigger than life and be the sun, and yet she was being trapped in this artificial manifestation of what that looked like.”
Communication freshman and Technical Director Seidy Pichardo helped lead the show’s stage crew efforts. Working with the show’s scenic designer, Pichardo led a team to create the set, which included Charlie’s apartment and the rooftop.
“It takes an army to bring something as beautiful as ‘CRAVE’ to life,” Pichardo said. “Everyone in this process is so talented and an expert in their craft.”
One such team member was Communication sophomore Madison Anderson, the show’s producer.
Anderson worked with Bodé and Communication senior and Director Talia Hartman-Sigall to select designers for “CRAVE.”
“This was such a fulfilling process for me. I got to facilitate conversations between so many different people and just be the middle ground and liaison for all of these different elements that were put into the show,” Anderson said.
Bodé said “CRAVE” features “young people at a transitory time in their life” who are “trying to cope with something that feels beyond them,” making it applicable to a college audience.
Communication freshman and Vertigo member Creighton Smith-Allaire helped build the set. He said he found the flickering lights that indicated Anna’s presence particularly memorable.
However, Smith-Allaire also took away a greater message related to the way in which Charlie and Maeve grieve Anna from the show.
“These people who are gone, we each remember them differently, but we remember them best when we unite and remember them together instead of choosing how we want to remember them,” Smith-Allaire said.
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