Central offers lively comedy

WANT TO GO?

WHAT: "George Washington Slept Here"

WHEN: 7:30 Friday and Saturday

WHERE: Central High school Auditorium

ADMISSION: $4.00 adults, $2.00 students

If the Cape Central High School Tigers had qualified for Saturday's state 4A football semifinals in Hannibal, Mo., drama teacher Cynthia Bradshaw would be figuring out how to punt.

Three members of the football team and four members of the marching band also are in the cast of "George Washington Slept Here."

The comedy Bradshaw is directing is to be presented Friday and Saturday nights at the high school auditorium.

The Tigers' loss by a point in the quarterfinals earlier this week meant they won't be playing in Saturday's semifinal game, those cast members won't have to choose between football and theater and Bradshaw won't have to figure out what to do if football had won out.

"There was no plan B," she says.

Theatergoers, at least, can be happy with the outcome because "George Washington Slept Here" is an enjoyable, sometimes wacky confection well-played by a talented Central High School cast whose starting team numbers 17.

Instead of putting country mice in the city, the play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, transplants the cosmopolitan Fuller family to a quaint Pennsylvania farmhouse where the father of our country may or may not have slept. The same dilapidated, antiquated house that thrills patriarch Newton Fuller (Brent Humphries) horrifies his wife, Annabelle, (Bethany Burchyett).

"I could spit from here to Mount Vernon," she says on learning Newton has bought the house.

The house has no running water unless you count the leaky roof. There's a plow in the living room, and corn-fed caretaker Mr. Kimber (T.J. Bishop) leads no one to think the situation is going to get much better.

Play percolates

"George Washington Slept Here" percolates with storms and locusts, affairs and pregnancies, deceptions and destruction of private property. The plot turns on the rising costs of maintaining this money pit and on the family's desperate need to find water on their property.

Their savior could be Uncle Stanley (Tyler Roeger), an ungenerous industrialist who gets the white meat at family holiday dinners because everyone hopes he will change his ways in his will.

No help in this situation is the actor Clayton Evans (Jason Van Cleve), who takes a fancy to the Fullers' young daughter Madge (Lauren Parrent). Evans' wife, actress Rena Leslie, (Liz Robertson), is not one to suffer alone for long.

Dane Lincoln plays their nasty neighbor Mr. Prescott.

Steve Eldridge (Clay Schermann) is Madge's unappreciated boyfriend, whose abilities as a surveyor nontheless come in handy.

Also convenient to the plot is Mrs. Douglas (Carly Pind), who has something that could change the Fullers' fortunes.

The loose cannon in this mix is the Fullers' mischievous nephew Raymond, gleefully played by Nick Ervin.

Burchyett makes a nice about-face as the wife who comes to love the house she used to loathe, and Humphries plays Newton Fuller with the right amount of earnestness and resignation.

The large cast does a good job of keeping the fast-paced dialogue moving and the entrances timely. Kudos to stage manager Laura Bowlin.

Also appearing in smaller roles are Lisa Crain, Whitney Quick, Derek Ruth, Adam Tucker, Stacy Dohogne and Chelsea Sellers. Xavier Harrison is the student director. The set was designed by Bryan Suntrup and Bowlin.

Bradshaw, by the way, is the same longtime Central High School teacher who has been directing plays under the last name Wyatt. Last August, she married Joseph Bradshaw, who is the play's technical director.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182