Summer in the theater

For the next two months, Janel Mason, Meagan Edmonds, Tim Nicolai and Marcus Stephens are going to spend 24 hours a day thinking about theater.

They will be among 25 college students mounting five different productions at the Huron Playhouse in Huron, Ohio, a resort town on Lake Erie. While performing one show, they will be rehearsing for the next and often will work 100 hours a week. It's not exactly a summer vacation.

Most of the students in the summer-stock performing company also will work on the technical side of the productions and even in the kitchen during their stay. In return they will receive room, board, a stipend and 12 hours of college credit. In the world of summer stock, this is nirvana for college actors, says Dennis C. Seyer, a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Southeast.

"It's one of the best summer theater experiences around -- primarily because they care about the company members."

The summer stock theater company, which presented its first production in 1949, also has a support staff of about 25. The theater seats 615 and usually is sold out.

The students were chosen from a pool of 400 applicants who submitted videotaped auditions. Once they arrive at the playhouse, which is associated with Bowling Green University, they will audition for specific roles.

They will begin the summer season the first week in July with Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music," followed the next week by a comedy called "The Nerd." Rodgers and Hammerstein return the third week in the form of the musical "Cinderella."

The Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman classic "You Can't Take It With You" will hold down the fourth week. The final production will be "Little Mary Sunshine," a musical lampoon of old-time operetta.

Edmonds and Stephens are seniors, Mason and Nicolai are juniors at the university. Edmonds and Nicolai have never been away from home for such a long period.

They all expect to become more rounded by the experience. "I think it will be so intense we can't help but be better performers," Nicolai says.

"If we can do this there we can do it anywhere," Stephens adds.

Edmonds hopes the Huron Playhouse will expand the actors' knowledge about themselves, "not just in theater but in our everyday lives."

They will be working with actors, actresses and directors they are not accustomed to. Going to Huron is exciting and also scary, Nicolai said.

"All actors have a sense of competition. You want to go there and do well. What if the other people are absolutely incredible?" he wonders.

Besides performing, Nicolai will work in the box office. He has played a number of roles in University Theatre productions, but says the one he learned the most from was a character most unlike himself -- Barry, the abusive father of a mentally disabled young man living in a group home in "The Boys Next Door."

"He was so far away from who I am in real life I had to push myself," Nicolai said.

Last season, Edmonds sang in a trio and appeared in dance numbers in "Sondheim!" and played a clown in "The Frog Princess." Naturally bubbly, she hopes to find a bad-girl role in Huron.

"Something not typical to who I am as a person. I'd like to explore some different emotions."

Stephens spent last summer at the Huron Playhouse. This year, he accepted the job of associate technical director and will design the sets for one of the plays. "I'm the grunt guy who builds stuff," he says.

In 1997, Stephens appeared in "Henry IV" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" on the Rose Theatre stage, but thereafter switched his focus to the technical side of theater. This year he designed the set for the Vietnam drama "A Piece of My Heart" and costumes for a number in the "Full Tilt" dance concert.

There's a reason the Huron Playhouse chose so many students from a single university, Stephens said.

"Southeast has a good reputation of putting out hard workers."

It probably doesn't hurt that Seyer is friends with Jann and Frank Glann, who run the theater. Frank Glann is a former Southeast technical director. Seyer was the scenic designer for the Huron Playhouse summer stock productions there in 1993-94 and 2000.

Edmonds is a Central High School graduate. Nicolai and Stephens both graduated from Jackson High School. Mason is from Scott City, Mo., and attended Notre Dame High School in Cape Girardeau.

She also hopes to encounter some new kinds of roles in Ohio. At Notre Dame she played the nasty Queen Aggravain in "The Princess and the Pea" and curvaceous Hedy in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." At Southeast last season, she played the wicked witch Baba Yaga in "The Frog Prince" and sang two vampy numbers in "Sondheim!"

"I'm always the villain or the sex object," she says, laughing.

She wouldn't mind a chance at being Cinderella for a change.

The four aren't the only Southeast theater students doing summer stock. The others already have left Cape Girardeau. A fifth Southeast theater student, Mike Schwent, is going to the Huron Playhouse to work on lighting and sound. Alex Seiler is involved in the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., Sue Johnson is at the Northshore Theatre in Beverly, Mass., Todd Masterson is at the Lincoln Amphitheatre in Evansville, Ind., and Dan Graul is at the Main Street Theater in Quakertown, Penn., and Sarah Moore is working at The Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, N.C.

Edmonds, Nicolai and Stephens plan to attend graduate school once they're finished at Southeast. When she graduates, Mason hopes to catch on with a traveling theater company. "How many people get to do their job and get applause for it?" she asks.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182