Rattling the Classroom

From the darkness, glowing bones emerge. Cue the music, and suddenly the three gangly, glow-in-the-dark skeletons are dancing, chanting, "Save the bones for Henry Jones, 'cause Henry don't eat no meat!"

These are no ordinary skeletons, of course. It's the yearly theatrical event staged for incoming students in "Introduction to the Theater" (aka "Baby Drama"), and the rattling bones belong to three costumed professors. At the end of the sketch, a fourth professor dressed as a ghost emerges from the wings, giving the skeletons a fright.

The students watching "are completely dumbstruck," laughs Wendy MacLeod '81, the James Michael Playwright-in-Residence. "They don't know how to respond to their professors being so infantile."

But the sketch has a point. "It gives them the notion of a theatrical event," says McLeod. "Before they even get to writing plays, we want to show them how to use the idea of spectacle, which is in Aristotle. How to use your voice as voice, instead of conversation. How to give the audience something interesting to look at."

The sketch also offers a concrete example of a project the students will have to put together that semester: a short entertainment using a limited budget and no stage lights. It just goes to show that "you can throw together a piece of theater under those limitations--you can entertain just using bodies and space and some imagination," says MacLeod.

The sketches, which have been a tradition at least since MacLeod herself was a student at Kenyon, change from year to year. MacLeod thinks they might keep the skeleton sketch for one more round, though. It's a classroom classic, no bones about it.