'THISTLE BLOSSOMS': PROTECTING YOURSELF BETWEEN MOMENTS OF BEAUTY (THEATER REVIEW)

College freshman Lisa Bryant (Tonya Lynn) has written an essay that has upset her teacher, Dr. Jo Garrett (Holly Raines), so much she has dropped the student from her class. Soon we learn that the student's paper announced her plan to commit suicide on the first day of spring break, forcing the professor to intervene.

In the hour-long play "Thistle Blossoms," opening tonight at the Lab Theatre at Southeast, the audience sits only a few feet away as the troubled student and the angry professor wrestle with the gravity of the act that has been avoided and eventually search for reasons to trust each other.

Written and directed by Dr. Roseanna Whitlow, an assistant professor in the Department of Speech, Communication and Theater at the university, performances are at 8 tonight, Friday and Saturday the at the Lab Theatre, Grauel Building Room 104.

Theatergoers should arrive early because the theater has limited seating and because Whitlow has enriched the half hour before the play begins with an exhibit of paintings by Malgorzata Stepak, an original dance by Kelly Wolverton and classical guitar music by Sven Rainey, all seniors at Southeast.

The set for "Thistle Blossoms" is simple, just a teacher's desk and chair, four student desks and a blackboard. Not simple are the emotions and the dance occurring on stage.

"It's just a paper," says Lisa, still hoping for a mid-term grade. Whitlow ingeniously has the professor dissect the essay, her clinical critique of the writing rendering the message all the more horrifying.

Roman Smith makes a brief appearance as Jason, a student who drops by Garrett's room hoping for a break on getting his essay in on time. Jason's interaction with Lisa subtly reminds the audience how big a small look can be when you're 18 and alienated.

Raines and Lynn work well together. Raines plays the professor as prickly as a thistle herself, but as a teacher who treats the responsibility with care. "You walk through that door and you're mine," she says.

Lynn's Lisa is universal, a college freshman wondering what it all means and where she'll ever find her place in the world, sure only that no one else cares.

Hoping to remind Lisa that life offers light as well as darkness, the professor uses her paper's reference to a bridge going halfway and quotes Shel Silverstein's children's poem "The Bridge."

This bridge will only take you halfway there

To those mysterious lands you long to see;

Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fairs

A moonlit wood where unicorns run free.

So come and walk awhile with me and share

The twisting trails an wondrous worlds I've known.

But this bridge will only take you halfway there --

The last few steps you'll have to take alone.

Gradually, the student learns that her teacher knows personally how this particular kind of death cruelly devastates family members and friends left to cope.

The title refers to a reference in Lisa's essay to feeling like the one of the thistles in the park where the fraternities hold their beer busts and where she planned to kill herself. "Don't you see?" the professor asks. "We're all thistles. But most of the time, most of us hang on dearly for those sweet, brief times that our blossoms pop out! That thorniness -- our prickly exterior -- is what protects us between those glorious moments of beauty and greatness."

Whitlow says "Thistle Blossoms" is a compilation of personal and classroom experiences. "Through the years you lose a number of friends and have a few close encounters with student papers," she says. None of her students ever wrote a paper threatening suicide but, she says. "They send up warning signs."

Whitlow wrote "Thistle Blossoms" as part of her dissertation while a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She entered it into a competition and won a publishing contract.

This is the 100th production of the play in the past six years. Colleges, junior colleges, small community theaters and a number of high schools have mounted productions.

Assistant director is Nikki Redmond, with James Scott serving as stage manager.