What: Mad World
When: Sept. 25-26, 29 to Oct.3 at 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 27 and Oct. 4 at 2:30 p.m.
Where: University Theatre
After months of work-shopping, the winning musical of Ball State’s first Discovery New Musical Theatre Festival will be brought to life by the staff and students of the Department of Theatre and Dance.
“Mad World,” the opening production for this semester’s mainstage series, delves into the life of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.”
The Discovery New Music Festival received more than 100 entries from across the United States in 2014, and “Mad World” was chosen as the best choice to receive a full production, according to a Ball State press release.
Students and staff members involved with the production met with the musical’s Californian writers, Christian Guerrero, Chandler Patton and Steven Schmidt to figure out the most effective way to tell the story.
The workshops started in May of this year, and involved hours of discussion about the musical. Ultimately, the writers had the final say, but Eva Patton, the director of the musical and an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, said they were very generous and receptive toward the student and staff’s feedback.
In the musical, Carroll is an archdeacon at Christ’s Church and a logic and mathematics professor at Oxford. He is a shy man in his 30s who finds himself straddling two worlds.
“He is as immersed within the rigid societal and religious structures of Victorian England as a man at that time could possibly be,” said senior musical theatre student John Banes, who plays him in this production. “As his creative work is, to this day, some of the most infamous of the English-speaking world, he is also deeply immersed in his own imagination.”
To give outlet to his creativity, he entertains the children of his friend and employer, Henry Liddell.
The show presents three different worlds to its audience: 1928 London, 1860 England, and “a place of imagination and memory,” Patton said.
The show flashes backward and forward between these three worlds in order to tell the story as “a moving collage of memories,” the script writers said. Patton has worked to remain true to that message.
Eventually, these worlds “collide harshly for all the characters in the show,” Banes said. “Causing them to exist in a juxtaposed hybrid ... one Mad World.”
The duality that Carroll faces parallels the struggle many people may face in their own lives. People “may exist in two worlds at the same time,” Patton said. “Mad World” addresses how they balance that.
“I hope that ["Mad World"] will allow audience members to examine and come to some understanding of the duality in their own lives, the different worlds we sometimes live in and what it means to be more accepting and forgiving of ourselves as we try to navigate that paradox," Patton said.
The time spent working on “Mad World” has provided student actors with a valuable experience, Patton said.
“This really benefits the students because it allows them the rare opportunity to create a character for the first time and to be a real part of the collaborative process,” Patton said. “This gives the students a real sense of participating in the collaborative process that theatre is.”
Banes has embraced the opportunity.
“The challenge of navigating acting in a new work is my favorite challenge because there are no precedents,” Banes said. “For each role it is just the collaboration of actor and team within the given world of the script. It’s fascinating to me.”
Many who come to this show will be familiar with the literary works on which it is based, and Banes noted that the “vibrantly real” characters in this musical bring “new life to the actual human beings surrounding the creation of the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ books. The scandal, the mystery, the heartbreak and the joy are all explored in ‘Mad World.’”
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