Playing Nocturne

Patrick Midgley ’07 - Actor

by Karol Crosbie

Wooster senior Patrick Midgley was intrigued by the protagonist in the play Nocturne. But he figured it would be some time before he’d have the chance to play the gut-wrenching role of the young man who accidentally decapitates his little sister in a car accident. In the first place, it’s a plum role—–likened to that of Hamlet—demanding and complicated. In the second place, Adam Rapp’s play, which premiered in 2000, had been performed exclusively by professional companies, but never by an academic institution.

Midgley, a double theatre and history major, wrote his junior Independent Study on the playwright. But as is often the case with Wooster’s Independent Studies, that was not the end of the story. Shirley Huston-Findley, associate professor and chair of the theatre and dance department, sent Midgley to a conference in Los Angeles to present a paper on Rapp. And then she and her colleagues decided to produce Rapp’s play.

“I don’t think there are faculty members anywhere else who would have trusted their students enough and rallied around a production like this,” says Midgley. “Honestly, I don’t think I could have done this anywhere else.”

The trust paid off. Wooster’s production was selected from a field of 1,300 aspirants involving more than 200,000 students nationwide to perform at the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C., in April. The annual festival—the largest of its kind— allows colleges and universities to advance through regional competitions. The Kennedy Center performance was the third and last venue for the Wooster troupe, which also performed the play in Wooster and Milwaukee.

“The play is so simple, and small, and touching,” says Midgley. “ In all the levels of the festival, we—the little school—seemed to be the one everyone latched on to. It wasn’t about the polish of it, or how much money we had spent on it. It was like we had a story we more desperately wanted to tell.”

Although Rapp wrote the play as a monologue, it is often produced with varying degrees of involvement from additional characters. In the Wooster production, five characters joined Midgley, and he says he believes they strengthened the performance.

Working with the constraints of a $500 budget, scene and lighting designer Dale Seeds, professor of theatre, chose to suspend the few props in air. Floating overhead, simultaneously gentle and monstrous, are a black piano bench, the front end of a rusty 1970 Buick, and sheet music from Edvard Grieg’s Nocturne, the play’s namesake.

Rapp’s script has been both praised and criticized for its density. Long, metaphor-laden recitations conjure up the freak accident that crumples a family’s life and sends a young man through hell. “ Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse,” the narrator says. “It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity.… the heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a cold artery.” The narrator, named simply “ Son,” is required to sit in a chair and talk to the audience for 40 minutes at a time.

Says Midgley, “One reviewer of a past production wrote that the play made him feel like he was sitting in on a therapy session, and that the patient had overstayed his visit. For us, the challenge was for the play to never feel that way. Shirley and I did this by trusting the language, not letting it overpower us, but not overpowering it, either.

The flowery language is both an author’s style (Rapp was a novelist before he was a playwright) and a character’s defense. “ Every time after my character makes an objective, factual statement about the plot, he’ll take himself out of the emotion by retreating into those flowery metaphors,” says Midgley. “For example, he picks up his sister’s head and compares it to a ‘fugitive picnic toy, a ball.’ He tries to withdraw into his language.”

The script is so solitary that Midgley says he sometimes felt as though he were storytelling, rather than acting. Because there is so little interaction with the other characters—some are totally silent—he must keep the attention of the audience through language. “As an actor, you have nothing out there except the language. That’s what you listen to; that’s what you respond to.”

The group’s first audience was largely Wooster students, who listened in stunned silence, remembers Midgley. “I don’t think they knew what to expect,” he says. But as the group began performing for audiences who were more familiar with the play, there was more interaction. “I felt as though I was sharing the experience with the audience and they became part of the production.”

Midgley, who will pursue an M.F.A. in acting at Purdue University, says he will always remember his Nocturne experience as a precise intersection of talents. “It felt as though everything came together perfectly.We were the perfect people for a perfect play.”