Seeing students make art is always a humbling experience, whether or not the final product creates huge waves. Michael Trottier’s ’12 original play, Caricatures, is such a venture. It tells the story of Carla (Margaret Sargent ’14) a sociopathic con-artist who leads many lives and cons her friends for money, whether by blackmailing them or lying to them. The cast of characters include her sister Alyssa (Becca Levenson ’13), Carla’s mother and father, and five actors who play Carla’s friends, and Alyssa’s fiancé.

By way of plot, Caricatures is about Carla, who, for no real motive other than that she wants money easily, tells her friend Gertrude she needs money for her cancer treatment (she doesn’t really have cancer). She then seduces Gertrude’s husband and blackmails him for money. She then goes to her friends, the married couple Paul and Jenny (who are a flamboyantly gay man and a deadfaced butch lesbian) who want to have a baby but can’t because Jenny has “an inhospitable womb.”
She gets pregnant (by her seduction of Gertie’s husband) and tries to sell Paul and Jenny the baby. Carla’s father dotes on her, but pays no attention to his other daughter, Alyssa. Mother is a housewife with all kinds of repressed domestic problems.

Alyssa is in awe of her older sister and takes everyone’s emotional abuse with a smile. It turns out that Carla is killed in a car accident (or so everyone thinks) and the family, in preparing a memorial service, calls her friends who reveal Carla’s double life and how much they hate her. Alyssa tries to get the story of Carla’s double life by meeting with the people whom Carla has ruined, in her attempt to save her angelic view of her sister.

Sargent gave a standout performance as chief villain. I don’t think I have ever hated a character so whole-heartedly. Not only was she asked to basically be naked on stage, she created a despicable person who was  uncomfortably recognizable.

While I thought the first half of the play worked really well and was the strongest, the second half became plot-heavy and convoluted.

At the risk of sounding completely obtuse and ignorant, it might very well have been the playwright’s intent to write the second half as a melodrama; it just didn’t work for me. I think Trottier has a great sense for developing characters and a great handle on formal and technical choices, such as generic conventions and their manipulation.

The first part paints the characters as caricatures, in broad brushstrokes, so that they are easily recognizable stereotypes. For example, Carla is painted as a hyperfeminine femme fatale, Paul is painted as a flamboyantly gay man, Mother is painted as 1950s domesticity itself.

The second half reveals the characters in finer brushstrokes, so that we can see their complexities and they take on many dimensions, like real people. The play is concerned with the ways in which we see people or remember people. It suggests we remember people as caricatures, so that some insignificant attribute colors your perception of a person, and that attribute is all he or she becomes.

This thematic concern is achieved consistently by costuming choices, but more haphazardly by the actors’ abilities to inhabit characters and the writing. For example, Alyssa never stops being naïve (except for the ending, which felt forced), Father never stops being doting, Carla never stops being terrible.

However, the writing for Paul and Francesco Tisch’s performance as the character reveal a huge 360 in the character’s representation, so that the stereotype becomes painfully obvious, and almost uncomfortable because the audience is implicated.
Whereas Tisch’s performance in the first half makes use of stereotypically “gay” mannerisms, his performance in the second half reveals a conventionally masculine performance, augmented by disheveled appearance and newly developed alcoholism.

We learn that Paul’s homosexuality isn’t obvious to him the way it is to the audience, he’s trying to deal with his latent homosexuality and his ruined marriage, and it is painful for him.
Similarly Mother (Katherine Gagnon ’11) was a particularly well-developed and executed character, who goes from obedient 1950s housewife in pearls to quietly caring yet deeply unhappy mother, unappreciated by her husband and daughters.

As always, this was a great effort on Powder & Wig’s part, who overcame many technical and bureaucratic hurdles to stage the show. It leaves you believing that bright futures are in store for these students.