When the actress Raye Lederman said she could pick me up a ticket for The Medium, she said that she would also be needing my physical address in State College as well as my email address. I was not just going to see a one act opera. I was going to see a one act opera at Graham Spanier’s house, more formally known as The Schreyer House. It was quite a fancy experiment for me in theatre going. Apparently, it was an experiment altogether. According to the School of Theatre’s program for the show, Nathan Brewer was presenting The Medium as a second year directing project for his MFA candidacy. The challenge, the program said, was to present no more than 80 minutes of a musical with budgetary and production limitations.
I have to say, though, that whatever those budgetary and production limitations were, they were completely unnoticeable to an audience member. And perhaps that was due in part to President Spanier generously lending his house to the production. The rooms you entered looked exactly like the parlour rooms of a Regency inn. Jen Kach and I went to see the show together and couldn’t help whispering our awes as we hung our coats in the coat closet. You must whisper in the presence of greatness, you see. I almost felt like I should have curtseyed a thanks to the doorman who took our tickets and checked us off the list.
We were ushered into a plush sitting room where two rows of seats on three sides of the room inhabited the same stage as the actors. It was like a classic parlour entertainment for all sitting so intimately around the players. The show started promptly at eight with lots of playing indeed. The medieval chandelier brightened and Raye Lederman as Monica glided into the scene to find Blake Stadnik as Toby trying on a saffron silk scarf and a tambourine for a crown. Raye had an exceptional character variation in her singing voices. Because Toby’s character is a mute, she had to sing her own parts in the made up adventure of a Babalonian king with one voice, while also singing Toby’s would be parts in the duet with another. Throughout, Stadnik’s facial expressions and delicate finger movements as the muted Toby sold the character beautifully to a close range audience.
The experience was so intimate that when the medium, and Monica’s mother, entered upon the scene for the opening s�ance I did not realize that she was faking the s�ances. Raye Lederman’s silhouette in the darkness appeared to sing “Mother, mother, are you here?” to one of her mother’s patrons. But my immediate thought was that this was a choice made for the economy of the production. I figured the director did not want to insert another cast member into the mix for such a small appearance. Once it became apparent that the medium was using her daughter and Toby to set up the s�ances as hoaxes, the opera really got under way. You realize the medium is cheating at the same moment that she feels a hand reach out for her throat in the darkness.
As an audience member who has seen the medium’s own orchestration of the seance, you feel she must be imagining things, having gotten too deep into the mood of the hoax. Still, right along with her, the audience is haunted by the “Mother” refrain as well as the sounds of a laughing baby that come from an unknown space offstage. These sounds, which the audience understands normally to be imitated by Monica as a stand in for actually communicating with the dead children of the medium’s clients, are especially frightening when Monica is on stage with her mother and clearly not the source of them. But even before the sourceless songs or laughter are heard, the creepiest moment of the whole show was probably when the medium tries to expose her hoax to her clients to cleanse her soul. She has her daughter imitate each of their lost loved ones in front of them. The way Raye opened her mouth and shamefully hung her head to the side created an unnatural contrast to the playful baby laughter that echoed throughout the room.
Kira Lace Hawkins as the medium took everyone’s tingling spines and tripped up and down them in the final scene of haunting. Clothed in her form fitting gown and sparkling jewels, the low candle light glinted off her as she ran around the room with her mouth open wide to the audience asking, “Afraid? Am I afraid?” She kept repeating this phrase to the very end, and yes, I was rather afraid. In the building tension of the final strains on the piano, the music abruptly, and almost unnaturally, cuts off to silence, leaving the audience shocked and enthralled. Not even the addition of the lights at the end of the show could completely allay our unease. When Jen and I collected our coats and walked into the thick darkness down Graham Spanier’s drive, we linked arms, lest the off stage voices should follow us into the night.