By Grace Pateras
[email protected]
A chainsaw, some roller skates, and a human that turns into a bird are coming together tonight.
Love Me Tender, Che Guevara, written and directed by University of Iowa undergraduates, opens at 8 p.m. today in Theater Building Theater B. Performances will continue through Oct. 11.
Violence, in not just combat but language and circumstances, await audiences, playwright David Freeman said.
“I think there’s a heightened state you can be in when you’re in a room where there’s this comedy and violence working together,” he said.
The play, set in Bolivia, follows Houston (freshman Liam Crawford), as he goes in search of Che Guevara’s hands, which went missing after his execution.
In real life, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was a Marxist revolutionary leader in Argentina, Bolivia, and Guatemala. He aided Fidel Castro in overturning the Cuban government of dictator Fulgencio Batista.
“[The play] came out of a lot of research I was doing at the time about Che Guevara,” Freeman said. “I was working on these poems originally about Che Guevara, and they were really, really bad, and then I put them in a drawer. The play kind of came out of that failure.”
Freeman and Director Hiram Alexander Orozco recruited senior Lauren Watt over the summer to be the play’s stage manager. She takes on a show once or twice a semester; she started getting involved in her freshman year.
The dynamic of everyone involved is very positive and new, she said.
“All three of our main designers [scenic, costumes, and sound], this is their first time doing that job,” she said. “We’re all seniors, and we’re all trying new things. All of us on the design team are really good friends too, so it all worked out.”
Auditions for the four cast members, held at the beginning of the fall semester, were open to all majors. Freeman said the members were obvious choices for what he looked for.
Senior Nate Hua, a chemistry major and theater minor, plays Diego. With a cast of only four, everyone gets a lot of lines, he said. Memorizing those lines, though, takes a lot of work.
“It’s a lot of repetition,” Hua said. “It helps to run lines with somebody else, too, so you get a flow for the scene. After a while, you stop memorizing the words, and you start to remember the process. Then you can memorize it as a conversation.”
Rehearsals, which started on Sept. 1, begin each day with a few action scenes, which require more practice.
“We dive into scenes for the first half hour [of rehearsal],” Hua said. “We get warmed up, in our bodies, moving. We loosen up, do some vocal exercises, we run different scenes.”
The actors make the show come to life once it is on stage, Freeman said.
“That’s what’s cool about doing a project with so many different people,” he said. “What is happening [on stage] is more interesting and more inclusive than what’s going on in my brain. The play, until it’s staged, is really half-done. Writing it is only half of it.”
THEATER
Love Me Tender, Che Guevara
When: 8 p.m. Today-Saturday, 2 p.m. Oct. 11
Where: Theater Building Theater B
Admission: $5 general public, free with valid UI student ID
