“The Good Doctor” draws us into Chekov’s creative world
Keely Lyons, Staff Writer
There are chairs hanging from the ceiling and props dangling from the stratosphere. “The Good Doctor,” a production by playwright Neil Simon, promises a collection of compelling narratives.
The North Greenville theatre department has a lot of exciting things up its sleeve with this production. “The Good Doctor” follows the life and the imagination of Anton Chekov, a Russian playwright and short story writer.
Caitlin Boisture, stage manager for the show, said, “Neil Simon took those short stories and turned them into vignettes. The writer [character] is loosely based on Anton Chekov. He is saying, ‘Here are the stories I wrote– see if these appeal to you.”
The show follows many stories within a story, as the main character, Chekov, lays his beating heart before the audience and tells them his tales of humanity at its most vulnerable.
Boisture said, “It’s a stream of consciousness grounded in reality, but spewing out a new life and new world. It’s about finding that balance between imagination and reality. Many of these vignettes are reminiscent of his own life and the social and political issues of that time.”
Veronica Rogers, theatre major at NGU, makes her debut as student director for the show. Rogers said, “Most of these characters make very poor choices or have awful motivations going into these stories, but they have the opportunity every time to choose hope and to choose something new and better than what they anticipated they could be.”
She said the experience has made her love the collaborative process with her friends in the department. She added, “There is always such vivacious energy my cast carries and that is where I am so lucky. They want to be here. They want to be part of this show.”
Bess Park, returning faculty member of the NGU theatre department, has created the sets for the show. The pieces are representative and steampunk in nature, giving the audience room to contemplate their deeper meaning.
Rogers said, “She is incredible. She has replicated the idea of a clock [on the stage]–not so overtly that the audience comes in and says ‘it’s just a clock on the floor,’ but the essence of the time that is chasing us. The blocking for the cast is also intended to resemble when the clock winds and they try to reverse time.”
For actors, it has given them the opportunity to play multiple characters in the show. J.P. Waynick, an actor in the production, said, “I have the absolute honor to play the ‘Bemused Romantic.’ I am the traveling musical lover-boy of the show. I also play a couple of characters that are very anxious and very introspective and inside their own heads. ‘The Good Doctor’ is very interesting–it’s also very funny. I didn’t expect it to be as funny as it was, but the whole show is about taking these awful circumstances and making them funny.”
The show encapsulates life in its integrity and honesty, portraying even the most puzzling and obscure crevices of the human condition. Actress Abigail Dover plays the “Madame” overarching character type. Dover said, “I play a woman who feels trapped by society, but she is fighting for something.”
Dover says she feels that characters like this speak to many individuals, not just women. She added, “There are a lot of themes of love and what that looks like–what it should look like, versus what it sometimes looks like in the real world. There is one scene in particular and it’s an older couple discovering love again with each other for the first time and it’s my favorite scene in the whole show. It’s beautiful.”
The cast and crew echo their desire for people to come and immerse themselves in the theatre experience.
Waynick said, “Hopefully people will come and we will give them something to think about. If they wake up the next morning and think, ‘I wonder if this is what this meant.’ If they continue to think about your show, you have done your job correctly. I think that any good show causes you to think.”
“The Good Doctor” opens on Feb. 17 and runs through Feb. 26. Students can arrive on Mondays at the theatre box office before each show to receive a free ticket and a credit toward cultural events.
*Featured Images: The cast of Neil Simon’s “The Good Doctor.” Photo courtesy of Veronica Rogers.
