Barking Up the Right Tree

Angel (Joshua D. True) delivers non-disclosure forms to Nigel Penthorp (Matt Tucker) and Mickey (Fred Cassellius) as they parachute into occupied France. Photo by Marc Cryan

Right from the beginning, you know that Nobody Knows You're a Dog, penned by our own Dean O'Donnell, is not going to be your average play. While seated before the show, I took note of a very interesting set layout. Rather than being seated in front of the action, the audience is seated on both sides of a stage that runs almost the full length of the hall. I was seated on the left side of Alden Hall, in the second row. At the left end was the actual stage, in the middle were two tables and a booth of some kind, and at the right end was a high cube with steps and ladders up to it. Lighting was behind the audience, shining towards the middle, above the stage shining on the cube, and above the cube, shining on the stage so that any combination of left, right, and middle could be lit.

The play opens with an old sound clip of Winston Churchill setting the scene with news of Germany invading France in World War II. The lights come up on the right side and we see two characters sitting on the edge of a cube, with a third sitting with his back to them, and they are evidently flying a B-17 over enemy lines. Within a few moments, however, the lights come up on the opposite side of the stage and four adventurers in a medieval setting explore a castle. In the first 10 minutes of the play, two characters "die" on each side, and the action switches to the middle where we find out that both the left and right side represent virtual games, whose players are actually in the middle, in a bar in Boston in the present. Our recently "deceased" decide to play on the other side because they hear members of the opposite sex play there, and this is where the fun starts.

The truly engaging part of the first act was trying to figure out who was who in which world. There are 8 "real" characters, and 8 virtual characters, and it isn't made clear who is whom, because gender isn't consistent between the worlds. At the end of the first act, I knew who ONE of the virtual characters was in the real world, but I spoke with the assistant director at intermission who clued me in to watching the colors. Each player in the real world wore something of a particular color and their character in the game did too - Brett (Laura Horning), for instance, wore a bright yellow shirt, and her character in the WWII game had a yellow scarf around his neck.

The second act was packed with jokes and humor as the various players tried to discern the gender and orientation of other characters so that they could "hook up," and the play provides a convenient way for them to meet in real life - a conference where they all would play together in the same room at the same time. I wouldn't want to spoil the end of the play, but it all works out in the end.

The directing was fantastic in this play. There were so many things that were coordinated - lines, and even pantomimes that the players did as their character interacted in the virtual world, and many sound clips including one of kung-fu music for the monk character, cows when the British pilots were hiding out in a barn in rural France, machine gun sounds, magic spell sounds, and pyrotechnics. With so many characters interacting in different environments at different time periods and all the action happening on stage at almost exactly the same time, directing this must have been a feat in itself.

Even more impressive than the set or the directing was the acting. The more we see of the characters in the real world, the more we see that their personalities are reflected in their virtual alter egos. The two original characters of Miragia, the fantasy game, catch on that their new companions are men, although they look like women, and we can see that. We can see the kindness of Nicholas (Michael Tuxbury) glimmer through in his character, Nigel (Matt Tucker), and we can see the sweetness of Brett (Laura Horning) in her character, Mickey (Fred Cassellius). That two actors can portray the same personality in different scenes and contexts at the same time in itself is astounding.

Nobody Knows You're a Dog is a comedy in every sense of the word. It mocks our online, connected, geeky, computer gaming culture in such a way that the audience, WPI students (largely quite similar to the players), understand sometimes how silly online romances are. The stock characters such as Nog (Elliot Field), Glurg (Randall Wainwright), and Fettle (Justin Cole), three "Swamp Orcs" who act like cavemen and defeat the evil wizard Madrigor with "swamp gas", are just one example of the comedic stereotypes that make up a good portion of any comedy's characters. The incongruity between the gender of characters and their players becomes a large part of the humor as the players and the audience try to figure out who is whom, and there is even a bit of deus ex machina as the maintenance program in the WWII world, represented as an angel, brings Mickey back from the dead when he gets shot by border guards. To finish the whole play off is the typical ending of a comedy, which fits in perfectly.

This play is definitely worth the $3 or $5 ticket price and then some. The only failing in the entire production was that the lighting on the right side of the set shone through the black curtain at the back of the stage, where we could see people working, perhaps on sound production. (At first, I thought it was a black and white movie clip) This minor mishap can be easily overlooked in the face of great acting, a hilarious script, and impressive directing. Hopefully in this day of computers, email, and romance over the Internet, this comedy will catch on and we'll be able to download a video clip of the play over the web someday.