Isa Cruz

Last Friday, Masque and Gown presented Spooky One Acts,  marking the beginning of Halloweekend in the Wish Theater lobby. The audience filled the first and second floor, crowding around the giant spider web display illuminated by Halloween-themed lighting.

The event was a three-play-long directing competition, with short renditions of “Variations on the Death of Trotsky,” directed by Ben Sachs ’26, “Dracula,” directed by  Anders Larson ’26 and “The Bargain,” directed by duo Will Churchill ’27 and Micah Sher ’27.

The directors of all the plays tried to accentuate humor and spookiness throughout the productions. Sachs’ rendition of “Variations on the Death of Trotsky” involved a non-linear script with various iterations of Trotsky’s death, from a romantic comedy style to a more melodramatic style. In one particularly humorous moment, Associate Vice President for Safety and Security Randy Nichols intervened to explain how the deaths would involve a slow lie-down of Michael Gordon ’25, playing Mr. Trotsky, to prevent safety hazards. In “The Bargain,” a play depicting the attempted reaping of a woman’s soul, the usage of the puppet by the demon Marcy drew laughs from the audience.

But when all was said and done, “Dracula” was voted best-directed play by the audience. “Dracula,” involving much flouncing on the part of the titular vampire—played by Jed Hoggard ’25—depicted the efforts of characters Jonathan, Van Helsing and Mina, as well as two partly intoxicated college students, to stop Dracula. Mia Schiff ’25, the president of Masque and Gown, explained what the play had done well.

“Anders did a really great job, considering it was the longer one of the plays, with really keeping the audience engaged the whole time. Sometimes it actually gets hard if [the plays are] longer because you don’t want to have a lot of time in between scenes, moving stuff around,” Schiff said. “He was very streamlined in the way he directed that one.”

Schiff explained that the popularity of the spring One Acts Festival prompted the Spooky One Acts.

“Masque and Gown, every year, does the One Acts Festival in the spring, and it’s one of our popular events that we put on. We always get a really great turnout,” Schiff said. “So this year we thought, ‘If this is so popular in the spring, why don’t we do one in the fall as well?’”

The process of preparing for the Spooky One Acts differed from a traditional play in many ways, especially because of the short, two-week time frame. Will Pappendick ’24, playing Jonathan Harker and the Captain in “Dracula,” elaborated more about the preparation for the cast.

“We basically had five days to get fully off-book, so that was definitely intense, especially for other cast members who had more lines,” Pappendick said. “And then it was like rehearse, rehearse, rehearse every day.”

Setting up the technical aspects of the stage—the lighting, the props, the background—was also a very different process due to the play being held in the Wish Theater lobby instead of a traditional stage.

“Doing a play in a black box theater is really cool and freeing and just different. The stakes feel lower. You can just have more fun with it. We were only working with six lights and one speaker, so you can’t get super fancy, you can’t get super technical,” Julia Starck ’26, the technical director of Masque and Gown, said. “It feels more fun because you just get to play around and do maybe weirder things than you would do in a traditional show.”

The Spooky One Acts were also a unique opportunity for a diverse crowd to come together and build community, both audience and cast-wise. The short nature of both the plays and the time commitment for the preparation brought in many people outside of traditional theater.

“It’s a two-week commitment,” Starck said. “So [for] people at Bowdoin who love theater and acting who are usually busy and don’t normally have the time for a longer commitment, One Acts is a perfect opportunity for those people to show their skills.”

Going forward, Schiff was optimistic about continuing Spooky One Acts, establishing it as an ongoing fall tradition.

“The consensus [among the Masque and Gown board] was we want to keep doing this in the fall, and we wanted to really impart on everyone that this is not replacing the one in the spring. Going forward, we are hoping to have our Spooky One Acts in the fall and our normal One Acts Festival in the spring,” Schiff said.