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Python-esque satire of mid-century American values.
The storyline goes like this: It’s early December 1939. The well-to-do Stanleys have invited radio talk show celebrity Sheridan Whiteside, who is passing through their small Ohio town to dinner, hoping to score the social coup of the decade. Instead, Whiteside slips on some ice on their front steps and spends the next two weeks recuperating in their house.
What the Stanleys meet when “The Man Who Came Tb Dinner” emerges from his weeks of being an invalid in their home is not what they expect. He quickly forces them to relinquish control of their own home—including their butler, their cook and housekeeper, their daughter, and their son— and threatens them with a lawsuit for $150,000 in damages for his fall on their front steps.
Whiteside, superbly played by senior Derrick Hiserman, careens around in a wheelchair practically the entire play and exudes a playful glee as he wreaks havoc on the hapless household.
However, Whiteside’s role as master of social manipulation is put to the test by his long-suffering secretary, Maggie Culter, brilliantly performed by Julia Baumgardner, who rebels from his control by falling in love with the local newspaperman, well performed by Daniel LeVans.
Senior Dawn Andreoni, who won a prestigious drama award this fall, turns in a bravura performance as the movie starlet Lorraine Sheldon who is absorbed in her comically manic world of deluded self-love and doesn’t realize she’s the laughing stock of the society pages gossip mill.
Talented eleventh grader Tyler Williams alternates between two roles with impeccable comic timing. First, he is the exasperated Mr. Stanley who must find a means to evict Sheridan Whiteside from his house. Second, he is the irrepressible world renowned playwright Beverly Carleton, whose voice impressions of British Lord Bottomly, whom Lorraine hopes to wed, are simply “r-rrip-ripping!”
As Mrs. Stanley, Melanie Tbrrance starts out in breathless admiration for her world renowned houseguest, but then loses her composure as Whiteside slowly unravels the fabric of her household and her family. Tbrrance performs with accomplished aplomb as the staid pillar of the community whose polite and genteel world comes undone.
Another of Whiteside’s wild bunch of friends is Banjo, zestily played by Sydnee Morgan, who swaggers in with the Nurse Miss Preen in her arms, chases after the housekeeper, and then sets things aright by trapping Lorraine in a gilt mummy’s case—thus enabling Maggie, Whiteside’s secretary, to marry Bert Jefferson and live happily ever after with the small town journalist.
As Whiteside’s nurse, Miss Preen, Ellie Dodd-Henze must endure a string of verbal put downs from the irascible house guest, but both nights she got the most laughs and spontaneous applause from the audience when she declares her independence and walks out on him.
It is time to sing praises that are long overdue for the high school drama program which has enjoyed a long run of well performed plays over the past decade. Jean Elizabeth has directed RCHS drama for three years.
This year the school’s theater program has come of age technically as well. No fewer than 18 students collaborated on the sets, props, costumes, sound and lights.
94.8%