All aboard for a perfectly college ride at WMU Theatre

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Curtain Call — your front-row seat to the unique, lively, and memorable performances shaping Kalamazoo’s arts scene. Supported by the I.S. Gilmore Foundation, this series highlights the creativity and community that make each show something special. All photos are courtesy of Western Michigan University’s Theatre Department.

WMU Theatre will stage a big piece of Shakespeare in March, and then in April, there’ll be a musical about a barber who gets a little too enthusiastic with his sharp implements.

But a little, obscure, deceptively simple play that ran Jan. 30-Feb.15 highlighted what college theatre is all about.

Not to get too spoiler-y, but at the end of “The Coast Starlight,” a young character declares with hope while facing an unknown future, “Everything is in front of me!” 

My date and I exchanged knowing glances at the end of the Feb. 12 performance. Our discussion in the car is best summed up as, “That was soooo college!”

We old cynics might remember what it was like, being young, grappling with life’s difficult choices, yearning to reach out to others, to reach out to the world. 

Featuring a young main character who’s making life-altering choices, missing life-altering connections, on the brink of disaster because he’s doing something impulsive, yet seeing his blank future as something exciting and full of possibilities, “Coast” is one of those perfect college plays.

Challenges and growth for actors, audience

I’ve had a couple of decades reviewing theater as an A&E freelancer. I know that WMU productions, as well as those at Kalamazoo College, can be fresh, sometimes challenging, and full of young actors spreading their wings. 

Someone looking for a night of theatre in Kalamazoo should realize that our local schools add variety and freshness to the listings. But if we had to pick and choose, what is the difference between college theatre and, say, The Kalamazoo Civic or Farmers Alley? 

Director Mark Liermann, Associate Professor of Theatre at WMU for 23 years, has worked for a few decades as a professional in theater. 

The main difference with college theatre, for him, is the reward that “as an educator, I’m always seeing the growth in the students,” Liermann says. 

“The Coast Starlight” by Keith Bunin, had its biggest run in 2023 at Lincoln Center. It’s relatively new, not well-known. It needs a small ensemble, a set of wooden chairs, simple props, and costumes of everyday 2000’s fashions. 

It’s not experimental, but the story plays out in interactions that aren’t interactions — dialogue is mostly the interior monologues of strangers on the Amtrak Coast Starlight train going up the Pacific. They are acting out what they wish they could say to the other passengers. 

It sounds more confusing than it is, to say that stage interactions are interior monologues acted out as actual dialogue between characters. But it works thanks to a cast that can bring the script to life for the audience.

In rehearsing “Coast,” Liermann saw his actors’ growth in “such a challenging piece, in a very unique way,” he says. “It demands so much of the actor, and the simplicity, and the conversational nature of it… It could easily fall into the trap of becoming too self-involved or, kind of going inward.”

Youthful exuberance, but no middle-aged actors

WMU Theatre is not the Kalamazoo Civic, which has devoted community theatre actors and high production values, Liermann says. Farmers Alley is an equity theatre with professional, seasoned actors, “and the fact that we have that quality of a theatre in Kalamazoo is really special,” he says.

Academic theatre has its pluses and challenges. “These are incredibly talented students. We recruit from all over the country. So we bring in a high level of talent,” Liermann says.

“The beauty of (student theatre) is that you get that youthful exuberance, energy…”

But, “we don’t have a 40-year-old man playing a 40-year-old man,” he says.

Twenty-year-old Aidan Dockendorf plays Ed, 40, a very stressed-out salesman whose sweat reeks of anxiety and booze. He stumbled onto the train during the performance we saw, with a performance both comic and tragic. 

Ed’s meltdown with his laptop, slamming it into the back of passenger Liz (Marryn Barney), reproduced that infuriating public transportation experience where someone is rudely hitting your seat from behind. Then he laments, as he sobers up, that he’s the guy everyone on the train hates.

Dockendorf isn’t 40, but he is from Oregon, where part of the train journey takes place, he tells us before the show.

At Western’s theatre department, he’s found a sense of community, and being in a show about leaving home, about strangers who remain isolated from each other, takes on new meaning as he’s gotten to know other students from around the country. 

“You have your community as a theatre department, and then we have our community as a show,” Dockendorf says. “And there’s never a dull moment as a cast. We’re always pretty on it together, and we’re always trying to find things to do together outside of rehearsals. It’s just like a second family, which is really nice.”

Maybe seasoned actors have similar experiences, but students work from a point of newness, of egos realizing they may be too fresh to have yet developed an ego.

The cast has grown as actors, Dockendorf says, because “We’re very open to everyone’s ideas, and it’s never a matter of anything getting turned down. It’s about how we make this idea work with the story that we’re trying to tell.”

A dream in a black box

“The Coast Starlight” was in the York Arena Theatre, a small “black box” space that can fit an audience of 115.

Six chairs on the floor represented six seats on an overnight train from LA to Seattle. Six passengers, speaking to each other (but not speaking to each other), moved the chairs about the stage, making things dynamic. 

The audience sat on four sides of the space, stage lighting leaking out to make us almost as visible as the cast. At times, the characters spoke directly to audience members. 

It was one of those stagings that made one feel more like a witness on the scene than an audience member sitting rows away from a traditional stage.

Before the night, Liermann told me the mechanics of the script’s concept, which were way too complicated to print here. 

Dockendorf’s description was simpler. It’s “as if I were in a dream.” A dream where realistic, but slightly surreal, subconscious fantasy conversations happen.

All of that sounds very avant-garde, but thanks to the cast and the staging, the story was easy enough to follow. 

TJ (Ewan Corski), is a young military man planning to go on the run to avoid being sent back to Afghanistan. Jane (Jade Downey) is the young woman he exchanges interested glances with. Noah (Kyle Maynard) is the veteran who spots TJ as a soldier with a problem. Liz (Marryn Barney), Ed (Dockendorf) and Anna (Molly Wilson) all get onboard with their tragedies and personal issues.

And they talk, argue, flirt, fantasize. Eventually, one stops wondering, ‘Whose head are we in, now?’ and gets wrapped up in their stories.

Some characters dive deep into imagined conversations. There’s that nagging question: What if I talked to that person? What if we connected? What if there was love, a house, a family, maybe a broken marriage, maybe a relationship that lasts until one has to watch the other die? 

As we said before, “The Coast Starlight” should really resonate with the college-aged individual. Whole heartbreaking lives are lived on that train. But after they get off the train, the future is full of possibilities.

Big productions to finish the season

Liermann says that the department, under the leadership of WMU Theatre chair Joan Herrington, strives to provide a mix of shows, big and familiar, and smaller and challenging. 

“Much Ado About Nothing,” will bring comedic Shakespeare to the Williams Theatre from March 20 to 29.

And to end the season, Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning “Sweeney Todd” will slice into the Shaw Theatre, April 10-25.

“Coast Starlight” was a simple set — though Liermann says there’s a lot of thought and effort going into what seems to be a minimalist production.

The coming Shakespeare and Sondheim will be a bit more extravagant. And this is where students also get to flex other stage muscles.

“What makes us truly unique is our student designers. And that makes us unique to most universities as well, in that almost every show will have a majority of student designers with faculty mentors,” Liermann says.

Well-known titles, big productions on the Gilmore Theatre Complex’s larger stages, are sure to bring in larger audiences. 

But another difference between student and non-student theater: Other theaters need “butts-in-seats” to survive — the big familiar shows. 

Academic theatre has the freedom to feature a variety of scripts to help student actors grow.

Speaking of “Coast,” “This one, you know, was a labor of love, truly,” Liermann says. 

There’s still time this season to catch WMU Theatre shows: Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” will be showing from March 20 to 29, and “Sweeney Todd” from April 10 to 25. 

Next year’s season features Charles L. Mee’s “Utopia,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats,” and Marcus Gardley’s “The House That Will Not Stand.” Tickets can be purchased HERE.