On April 23, I attended the opening night of If you do it again, I’m gonna freak out, a new play written, adapted and directed by Charlotte Burton ’29 and Brianna Mortimer ’27. The show was made up of selected vignettes from books, plays and other pieces of media. The 90-minute, 18-piece anthology featured adaptations of excerpts from books like White Noise by Don DeLillo and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. One of my favorite scenes was “Public Anthropology,” adapted from “Tonight My Western Sky Is Clotted with Blue Stars” by Mortimer, which was recently published in Lacuna.

If you do it again, I’m gonna freak out was unaffiliated with a larger production organization: It was all hands on deck. The minimalist playbill listed 12 actors who doubled as stage crew and directors who doubled as actors. Or maybe more like adapters who doubled as readers? “I don’t think I’m a very good actor. I’ve been doing it for a while. I think I’m a much better reader,” Burton said in an interview with the Collegian. Since many of the vignettes were adapted from books, it felt like Burton and Mortimer were actively telling the story, and I liked the layers provided by acknowledging storytelling as an act. 

“We thought, ‘What if we just take a bunch of our favorite short stories and novels and adapt them into vignettes for the stage?’ and we got the script ready over spring break,” Mortimer explained. “It’s inspired by The Portable Dorothy Parker, the play that went on in the fall,” Burton continued. “That’s one of the best shows I’ve seen at Kenyon. I just thought the form was really excellent and I wanted to try doing something like that.” 

The show began with Burton and Mortimer welcoming the audience at the door, and then closing the curtains and welcoming us again — this time from the stage. The pair paced in circles; they extended applause to the people that made this night possible; they pointed out the fire exits; they warned us not to use the bathroom where your flush (and other noises) would be heard. (This turned out to be a “Chekhov’s flush,” so to speak, as the bathroom proximity was used in one of the scenes later on.) 

My favorite vignettes were the ones I recognized from White Noise. The scene “Professor Lunch” wasn’t just great if you had read the book, though — I’m sure it was also entertaining for those who were new to the material. The energized cast grumped around a crowded table, eating lunch with increasing intensity as their conversations escalated similarly. (Asher Prady ’29 ate six bananas and I still remember Huck Amick ’29’s yelling.) The cast committed: eating, drinking, contemplating, maybe listening, loudly asserting, shouting, getting red — proving a point? The men yelled about topics like “brain fade” from too much attention on the TV, about brushing your teeth with your finger and about the “things they don’t teach.” 

Another highlight included “Bob Dylan Hotel Argument About Throwing Glass in the Street,” where Prady once again stole the scene with his Bob Dylan impression. While it is easier to recall the big laughs, there was also an underlying tension that had the audience laughing at most any moment.. 

“To Brianna, [Wallace] is laugh-out-loud funny. To me, he’s a little bit less laugh-out-loud funny,” Burton explained, though she added that seeing these words come to life made her appreciate the humor differently. As she continued, she pointed to the “bloated” language in some of the stories as inherently amusing. “’Public Bathrooms’ was my favorite vignette, because [of] the language. Tennyson [Fuhrer ’29]’s line, ‘We witnessed something only marginally mammalian in there, sir’ — that’s f***ing hilarious.”

There were quieter, more sincere additions to this anthology as well. For example, “Alcoholics Anonymous” put three characters adapted from Wallace’s Infinite Jest into a heartfelt conversation with two characters created by Mortimer. They sat in a row and stood when it was their time to lament to the audience without listening to each other. “A halfway house in Boston is one of the three rotating plot points in Infinite Jest. So half of that vignette is quotes from characters living in that halfway house,” Mortimer said. “The other half are real things I transcribed when I used to attend ]Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings on behalf of my friend freshman year of college. So two of the characters in that vignette are real people.”

I might like the play better now, after having sat on it for a couple of days. Getting to ask the directors, “So, like, what was the point?” may also have helped. “I’m really into absurdism,” Burton admitted, citing the scene “Le Feu,” which was entirely in French. “I wanted [to show] this idea of dissociating words from their meanings.”So, now. To critique or not to critique? That is the question. The play was good. It made me want to read more and I appreciated the public philosophizing. Or at least the philosophizing I got to do as a result of seeing If you do it again, I’m gonna freak out.