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Love/Sick Play Production at Highland Community College November 7-9

published October 15, 2019

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Come enjoy an evening in the town of Almost, Maine with Highland Community College’s latest production, Love/Sick, playing on stage November 7-9 in Culbertson Auditorium. Performances are Thursday, November 7 and Friday, November 8 at 7:30 p.m. with a final show, Saturday, November 9 at 5 p.m.  Tickets as always are FREE.

Love/Sick playwright John Cariani once said, “I love to welcome people into a world and then surprise them that they’re seeing stuff that’s a bit heavier than they anticipated. I like that experience as a theatergoer — to think I know right where I am, then find that I’m somewhere else and not even know how it happened. I’m interested in that.”

These interests and goals are certainly evident in Love/Sick, the second of his plays to be performed here at HCC; the first being the bewitching Almost, Maine from two years ago.).

Indeed, Love/Sick often referred to as a darker Almost, Maine, is — in Cariani’s words — “a bit heavier” than might be anticipated. This is not to say that the play is not funny. It is — very — and yet, like love itself, the characters inhabit not only the blissful meadow but also the precarious minefield of this most powerful of human emotions.

Like Cariani’s other plays, Love/Sick is representative of the artistic genre of magical realism, where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment.  In the theater, magical realism goes back to the classical Greek and Roman plays, where gods and seers and others with supernatural gifts appear and make unlikely things happen.

Love/Sick is composed of ten vignettes, each exploring an aspect of love and its consequences.

Describing the play, the writer has said, “a garden wall at home may conceal more secrets than the Great Wall of China.” So, leave your insistence on, “just the facts, ma’am” at home, exercise your willing suspension of disbelief, and be prepared to take flight and enter the world of Love/Sick, where anything and everything can —and does — happen.

The student cast of Love/Sick:

Lydia Bedigrew of Effingham, Kansas

Paige Collins of Osawatomie, Kansas

Samantha Edwards of Sabetha, Kansas

McKenzie Handley of Mayetta, Kansas

Tanner Holte of Mayetta, Kansas

Will Marshall of Whiting, Kansas

Kent Robb of Westmoreland, Kansas

Braden Shryock of Tonganoxie, Kansas

Beth Streit of Seneca, Kansas (understudy) 

 

Backstage and technical assistance crew:

Sara Armstrong of Blue Springs, Missouri

Kaylee Brown of Horton, Kansas

Rowan Crespo of Wathena, Kansas

Jazmine Christensen of Omaha, Nebraska

Michael Deware of Atchison, Kansas

Shea Duncan of Sabetha, Kansas

Saryah Harris of Kansas City, Missouri

Gabi Simmons of Topeka, Kansas

Candice Robinson of Kingston, Jamaica

Jacob Shackleford of McLouth, Kansas

Haven Zent of Wathena, Kansas

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