1940s Comedy to Hit Hall by Rebecca Keith Light Up the Sky, a farce which takes viewers behind the scenes of a small town play headed for 1940s Broadway, premieres tonight in Hall Auditorium. Written in 1948 by Tony award-winning playwright Moss Hart, the play is being directed at Oberlin by Paul Moser, Chair of the Theater and Dance Program and associate professor of theater. John R. Lucas, who spent years as managing director of theater at Brown University, is the play’s guest scenic and lighting director. While Light Up the Sky hearkens back to Broadway’s heyday, Moser believes the play is still relevant to Oberlin audiences and certainly to performers. He commented, “I chose Light Up the Sky because it’s a very truthful teaching play about the process of making theater. While it uses vaudevillian schtick and parody to entertain, it nevertheless has a substantive message: if you have something to say, you must learn how to handle criticism and working with all kinds of people, in order to say it. This is an important lesson to learn in the Arts or in any other field for that matter.” Just as Oberlin students can relate to the lesson hidden in the comedic layers of Light Up the Sky, the playwright himself clearly drew from his own personal trials in the theatrical process. Hart grew up in the Bronx and spent time doing grunt work at various New York theater organizations before beginning a partnership with George Kaufman. This collaborative tag team spawned such notable 1930s productions as The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It With You. The playwright also moonlighted as director of the musical, My Fair Lady. Despite Hart’s success, according to Moser, “Final drafts never came easy to him; every one of his successes resulted from months (if not years) of “blood, sweat, toil and tears.” Not only did Hart’s plays contain autobiographical elements, but the characters in Light Up the Sky, among other works, were satirical portraits of notorious Broadway personalities. While these celebrities were renowned among 1940s theater audiences, Moser pointed out that, even in 2002, the characters in Light Up the Sky “can still stand on their own as comic characters.” This production of Hart’s work boasts a star-studded cast of Oberlin students. First-year Carl Hurvich plays Carleton Fitzgerald, hack director of the show within the show. Senior Roger Barker is the producer, Sidney Black, and first-year Jessica Bedwinek is his wife, Frances Black, a famous ice-skater. Junior Hallie Gnatovich portrays Irene Livingston, a starlet, with senior Peter O’Leary as Tyler Rayburn, her husband, and senior Shinnerie Jackson as her alcoholic mother, Stella. William Dao and Aaron Mucciolo, both seniors, star as an older and novice playwright, respectively. It is Mucciolo’s character who writes The Time is Now, the meta-play which is set in Radio City Music Hall in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse. The action of Light Up the Sky centers around the opening night of The Time is Now, moving from before the curtain rises to after the first reviews are released. Moser commented upon the potential setbacks caused by reviews and previews of plays, noting that such conflict, along with “the commercial demands of the American Theater — where artistic idealism takes a back seat to box office reality [forms] the central dilemma of Light Up the Sky.” Light Up the Sky will open in Hall Auditorium today, Feb 8 at 8 p.m. Additional performances will be Saturday, Feb 9 at 8 p.m with a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, Feb 10.

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