It started with an illustrated creature pushing a brick out of a wall on a television screen. The creature proceeded to climb out of the wall, becoming a 3-D drawing, which morphed into different forms as it walked. Eventually, the thing climbed in and out of various walls, changing constantly as it went.

Various audience members asked each other what just happened before their eyes. Then the performers wheeled out the TV that showed ‘MUTO,’ the video-art presentation about this morphing cartoon creature, and act two began.

The original piece, ‘Little Person,’ is a combination of five skits with the uniting theme of identity. Sponsored by the Renee Crown Honors Program, the play began its showing Tuesday night and will run through Thursday in room 220 of Carnegie Library. Audience members at the first show laughed and looked on in awe (and some confusion) as the cast performed a host of weird and slightly off-beat scenes.

‘We call it an original piece,’ said Kristin Morris a sophomore musical theatre major and one of the five actors in the show. ‘It’s not a play, not a musical, it’s an imaginative collaboration. We wanted it to be a full experience.’

Each skit was intended to teach a different lesson, all pointing to the inner struggles people are bound to face on the road to self-discovery.

In the second act, Mark Blane, a sophomore acting major and the original organizer of the collaboration, sat at the center of the room sipping a cup of soda. He opens the cup, looks inside and pulls out and unfolds a life-sized paper person.

‘It’s different work that’s not done much in the drama department,’ Blane said. ‘It’s not as linear as other types of theater. It turned out really well.’

Blane’s skit, ‘This is Me (Paper People)’, included the discovery of dozens of paper cutout people, of various sizes. However the last, and most difficult to find cutout person, was see-through and placed on top of Blane himself, giving the illusion that he could identify and be one of the cutout people that he was finding around the room.

‘It was so surprising. Odd, but good,’ said Linda Moulton, a freshman drama major who said she would like to do a piece like this one some day.

The next (multi-part) skit, ‘Scrapbook: First Attempt,’ by Melissa Jessel, showed her attempts to jump into the scenes of her past. However, despite her sincere efforts, Jessel was never able to re-live her past.

‘Les Avions en Papiers’ (Paper Planes), first transformed the actor’s fingers into creepy crawlers, which jumped onto a paper plane and flew to a box full of masks. Once donned, these masks changed each actor into a different person.

‘Identity Theft’, a skit by Liz Tancredi, showed each character copying the fashion of the one before them until only one is left. But when tempted with a credit card the last individual person is pulled in and decides to copy the fashion as well.

At the end of the show, after Morris emerged from under a small box containing many mini paper cutout people, and the cast stripped down to tights with underwear on top, performing to the song ‘Little Person’ from the film ‘Synecdoche, New York.’

‘I’m just a little person in a sea of many little people,’ sang the cast as each member threw away an aspect of their skit, representing their personal identity, and joined hands for their final bow as a group. The crowd went wild and gave a standing ovation.

‘I liked the end with all of them coming together and being little people together,’ said Kristin Kelly, a musical theatre major. ‘There is a lot of academia in theatre, there are a lot of boundaries in drama, but this performance broke the binds.’

ampaye@syr.edu

Published on March 3, 2009 at 12:00 pm