Order up: Notre Dame's 'Restaurants and Relationships'

Notre Dame Regional High School is serving up three one-act plays for its fall production of "Restaurants and Relationships," set to run Nov. 1 through 3 in Cynthia R. King Performance Hall.

The plays -- all set in New York -- will be held at 7 p.m. each day and involve 20 students, with the plots focused on the development of relationships through the use of restaurants and food, Notre Dame Regional High School director of theatre Cynthia King said.

King's goal was to find one-act plays that would work together and have a common theme. She had several freshmen show interest in this year's production, and she wanted to find something to include them all, King said.

"Part of it was to see if we could get more opportunities for more people to be involved. If you find a play that has 20 people in it, that is a massive undertaking," she said. "And that usually means massive scenery."

"One Egg," a piece from 1934, serves as Act 1.

It features two young people who meet in a restaurant and are brought together by the difficulty of ordering one egg for breakfast. Junior Molly Sellers portrays the female character.

Sellers said her character is a free-spirited, upper middle-class girl who lives with her father, a writer. He wants her to take over the business and help him write comedies, but she doesn't want that, Sellers said.

"One Egg" is clever and witty, and King said she has seen growth in the student actors since rehearsals began.

"Today you can walk in and order just about anything you want at a restaurant, even if it's not on their menu," she said. "But this is an era where you didn't do that."

Act 2, "Something to Eat," takes place on a Sunday afternoon, with a young urban couple -- one is grading papers and the other is crocheting -- met with the classic dilemma: Where to eat?

Every restaurant the man suggests, the woman is against. She finally agrees to name a restaurant, but those she suggests do not appeal to him.

"They're all old restaurants in New York and each one of them has some type of issue that relates to their past that they don't want to go there," senior Nicholas Kelley said, who portrays the male character in the play.

Kelley also portrays multiple characters in Act 3, "Check Please," a night of numerous first dates gone wrong expressed within 16 scenes.

"The first scene, I put my personality into that," he said. "This guy thinks he's funny, but not listening to his date, so he keeps repeating what she says."

King explained it as a person's "worst nightmare" on a first date. She described the characters as strange and unusual.

"I remember coming in and talking to Miss King a week before auditions," Sellers said. "She told me, and I said, 'That's different.'"

Sellers said, "It's been coming together pretty well, and I'm excited for it."

More information and tickets can be found online at notredamehighschool.org.

jhartwig@semissourian.com

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