The first play of the 2001-2002 drama department season will be showing this weekend in the Helms Theatre. "The Hotel Welcome," a provocative and charming play written by Master of Fine Arts playwright Denise Laughlin, will be debuting this Friday.
Each semester, a few of the University's MFA playwrights get to stage their plays in the Helms as part of the Helms Theatre series. Each of these plays is written and directed by students. Laughlin's play is the first of this semester's offerings, and it will surely start the season off right.
While attending a church bazaar in Salisbury, N.C., Laughlin vividly remembers overhearing a woman say, "The Hotel Welcome is the last decent place left on the Mediterranean."
This woman in Laughlin's memory, looking like a million dollars in diamonds and a sun visor, was recounting a vacation she took with her husband to the French Riviera. While she had expectations of gourmet dining and glamorous entertainment, her cheap husband preferred touring the coast American-style, eating McDonald's cuisine and staying in cheap motels - not exactly every woman's ideal itinerary for a vacation in the south of France, but a perfect recipe for an intriguing story.
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Along with Agnes, the main character of Laughlin's play, "The Hotel Welcome," the lovely lady in Laughlin's memory found the Hotel Welcome to be the only place that could meet her expectations while on her honeymoon. In fact, in the play before leaving the hotel, Agnes makes a wish on a star that she will someday return - "in style," that is. This story develops in the play, as Agnes is found trying to persuade her best friend to have an affair with her husband. This would allow her to divorce him and go back to her beloved Hotel Welcome 'toute seule.'
Agnes "daydreams of the Hotel Welcome because it is her ideal," said Kathryn Budig, who plays the character of Agnes. "It might seem superficial, just wanting to go to fulfill the glamorous image, but it goes beyond that ... because of her bittersweet memories."
According to Laughlin, every character in the play has his own image of a Hotel Welcome, or a dream hotel. In addition to Agnes' dreams of the Hotel Welcome along the French Riviera, Owen, played by Bryan Antler, longs to leave the small town atmosphere and head for New York where he believes true excitement can be found. Elias, the owner of the town's antique store (played by Jeff Syte), dreams of the way Main Street used to be: free from mainstream competition and full of quaint local stores.
While each image is distinctly different, the dreams represent each character's longing for a place where life is just a little bit brighter and more exciting than their home, the small town of Warner, N.C.
Although each character in the cast longs for enchantment outside the town, Laughlin herself managed to find excitement and intrigue in a similar setting: Salisbury. This was where she first began writing the script for "The Hotel Welcome." After graduating from Catawba College in Salisbury, Laughlin later returned as a playwright resident at the college for a year. It was during this time, being left alone without her usual circles of friends, that she began to explore the personalities of the town's Main Street.
"This time I was returning to Salisbury without my usual friends, so the people in the town became my new friends," she said. Her time spent getting to know the locals gave her the ideas and inspiration for many of the characters in her play.
In "Hotel," Agnes and Ida can be found sporting elf suits, while Julius once again returns to jail. Along Main Street, Elias' antique store always is populated with an array of guests, amid his struggle to preserve the quaintness of Warner. Laughlin described this group of characters as "wonderful and quirky" and explained that their personalities are still developing, even in the later rehearsals. She referred to the characters' development as a "collaborative process" in that the actors and actresses continuously define their character's personalities as the script and Laughlin's ideas evolve.
For example, the character of Munsey, played by Tim Van Dyck, first emerged as a high-strung lawyer but has become a bit more complicated.
"Now we see him putting in a Christian-leadership tape and then rolling a joint," Laughlin said. "We're just starting to see how he plays into the big picture."
Not only is the development of each character a part of something that Laughlin refers to as "Workshop Style" - a style that is apt for change and refinement - but so is the set. Mainly set inside Elias' antique shop o"n Main Street, the set has an unfinished look. Everything is suggestive. There are no bars in the prison cells, just open space, and the floors of Elias' antique store are rugged, not overly stuffed with antiques.
At the heart of this collaboration lies a comical combination of 10 characters coming together in the small town of Warner. This relaxed style, seen in the play's set and in each character's development, can be labeled as "apt to change." To sum it all up, Laughlin said, "This cast is always suggesting and discovering things that are new to me"
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