Moravian College Tooth and Claw Reading in Review

Friday the reading of Tooth and Claw took place in the Arena Theater on the bottom floor of the HUB building at Moravian College, as previously advertised. The Arena Theater was more than half-way full of people.

Christopher Shorr, the director of the Theater program at Moravian College, presented the blueprints his interpretation with this reading. The reading was semi-staged, which is a term for when a reading is loosely blocked. In a normal reading, actors will sit in a row of a chairs, remaining seated for the course of the show and reading from the script. While a staged reading still means the actors are reading from the script (As opposed to memorizing their lines), the actors are up on their feet whenever they are in a scene, and seated only when they are not involved in the action on stage. In this reading it was mostly fine, but some of the actors appeared to be bored or distracted at times when they were seated, which was distracting for the audience as well.

Accents and Spanish lines, of which there were many, provided some problems for the play as well. Not everyone in the cast knew Spanish, and that showed at times. For the most part the lines were delivered in tact, and some actors made the switches between Spanish and accented English flawlessly (Like Dr. Jones playing Congressman Mendoza). Other actors, however, had very forced accents and pronunciations of Spanish words that left a lot to be desired.

Gianna Miranda, who I interviewed in this previous post, played an excited and determined Dr. Schuyler Baines, Thom Eiser's portrayal of her father Dr. Malcolm Geary was wise and tastefully restrained, and Dr. Jones took the cake for the most powerful actor on the stage. Alanah Cervantes did a good job in multiple roles, always supplying tension and interest to the scenes she was in.

The next reading in the series will be of Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire on Oct 14 at 8PM. More information is available at http://home.moravian.edu/public/eng/theatre/index.htm