On Stage: Performing Arts at Our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle

‘On the Verge:’ Intrepid Explorers, Mr. Coffee and Egg Beaters

Hartwick College students will be performing in “On the Verge or The Geography of Learning,” a play by Eric Overmyer and directed by Michael Tamburrino. Michael is a guest director at Hartwick, with a full-time role as the manager for the performing arts program at Fenimore Art Museum and Fenimore Farm and Country Village in Cooperstown.

I’ll get into the play—first produced on the Baltimore Stage in 1988—a little later, but to begin with I wanted to share with you a bit about Michael’s experience working with Hartwick students for the first time.

As part of Michael’s position as manager, he directs the main stage Glimmer Globe Theatre productions for FAM. When I met with Michael for an interview, he was in the midst of juggling his directing responsibilities with tryouts for Glimmer Globe’s upcoming production of “Hamlet.” So, I began my interview with him by asking about the difference between his work as director with professional and community actors at a place like Glimmer Globe, and students at the college level. His response spoke to some of what’s best about working in an educational environment.

“A lot of the students are doing it for educational credit. They come in with this intellectual hunger to really, really dig in and expand and develop their array of skills. Which, of course, we do get in the community theater, but here it was just a delight to see, and a delight to work with that sort of immediate hunger for development and learning new skills. It’s a little bit different scheduling-wise because all of these students are so busy, they’re involved in multiple different ensembles, and therefore we have to rehearse late,” Michael shared.

It was also different, he said, in terms of walking into a college theater department rather than hiring new production people for each play, as he does for community theater. At Glimmer Globe Theatre, he is the only full-time person, so for each show he puts together a new team of people to work with on the production. Michael enjoys the fun of this and feels fortunate to have so many talented people in the region, but working with the members of the theater department at Hartwick has its own advantages.

“It’s nice to be able to come into a tight-knit department, with members who are willing and able to jump in and assist with anything we need. They’re also happy to bounce ideas off one another, because usually I don’t have that already built in,” he said.

“On the Verge” is a funny, physical play about three women in 1888 who begin exploring the last unexplored territory–Terra Incognita—and find themselves moving through time. Once there, the three women begin to sense something is off.

As Michael explains, “They start encountering people who seem to be … using all these different accents. They’re using language that is unfamiliar. And the explorers start to find words they don’t recognize, coming out of their own mouths, too. And what they start to realize is that they are actually traveling through time as well as space, and they’ve slipped into like a temporal vortex… One of the tricky things about the language is that not only is it dense, but over the course of the play, it changes and becomes more modern, and slang and contemporary colloquialism start to work their way into their language. Subconsciously, they’re infected by the language of the future.”

Because of its emphasis on language, the show, “On the Verge,” has played well to Michael’s own theatrical specialization in Shakespeare. As he put it, “That [Shakespeare’s works] is the thing that I love most. I love working with the language. I love helping unlock it for people and helping people realize that once you can get past the barrier of a few unfamiliar words, the thoughts and the feelings are something that you can recognize intimately and immediately; I love, love doing that with people.”

Language in “On the Verge” plays a big role, and Michael recognized this. As a director, he needed to invest the time in making sure his cast was comfortable with the language they would be using. So he began by making the cast a 16-page lexicon full of definitions, images, and historical context for words and things mentioned in the play.

Michael explained why he created this lexicon as a first step, “… the first thing I said was, I’m giving you this to save you a little bit of time Googling, but this is the beginning of your work and not the end of it. Because knowing what a word means is only half the battle. Understanding why this character is using this archaic word, that’s just as important, and that’s the next step.”

When I went to watch a rehearsal, I could really see the effort that Michael and the cast had put into fully embracing and understanding the language of the play. I had read the script before attending the rehearsal (sans Michael’s lexicon!), and while I had needed to work to understand the script, watching the rehearsal and being swept along by the actors’ control of the pace and understanding of what was being said made my own ingestion of the meaning easy and very entertaining.

I loved hearing Michael talk about language and the power of it. He told me about a theory of language that I found particularly intriguing.

‘It’s the idea that when you learn a new language… it can change the way you think, and it can unlock new thoughts in your brain and that’s always been an idea that’s been very interesting to me, because language does, in a sense, allow us to express certain thoughts.

“There are some indigenous cultures in South America that think about the past as in front of us and the future behind us, because we know what happened in the past, that we can see it, so that’s in front of us. We can’t see the future because it’s behind us. Expressed in a different language it reframes the way you think about those sorts of things [the past and future].”

After the conversation about the language of the play, Michael went on to talk to me about the physicality of the play and working with the actors on bringing the rhythm of the language to their physical presence on stage. One of the actors, Mario Rosario, has to play eight very different roles in the play, and has spent a significant amount of time with Michael figuring out how to differentiate each role through both accent and movement. In rehearsal, I got to watch him as three of the characters and could see all the work done to make each character’s accent and movements unique.

Those attending will be struck as soon as they walk into the theater by the unique physicality of the play, for the stage itself is raked, tilted at a steep angle toward the audience. It is visually captivating and even more so as one watches the actors tromp, slide and dance across its surface. I know it has to be demanding to perform on this raked stage. I also know I would tumble down and be flat on my face at the front of the stage very quickly, were I to attempt it. In my defense, though, I did not grow up nor live as a student in Oneonta, City of the Hills!

So, if you want to spend an entertaining evening enjoying three intrepid female explorers, eight very different characters rolled into one actor, time travel, and some of the catchiest Burma Shave jingles created, all played across a visually captivating set, “On the Verge” is just what you’re looking for.

Oh, and why are three of the actors in the photos holding eggbeaters? (For those who have never had the pleasure of whipping up cream until your arms ache using one of these, an eggbeater is the metal contraptions being held up.) Well, I don’t have the space to explain, but it is worth going to find out.

“On the Verge or The Geography of Learning,” a play by Eric Overmyer and directed by Michael Tamburrino at Hartwick College will be performed April 16-19 at 8 p.m. in the Slade Theatre in Yager Hall.

Up Next: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, and directed by John McCaslin-Doyle, April 23–26.