From left: Freshmen Molly Murphy, Mike Jorgensen, and Amir Shirazi, in Gasson 100. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Freshmen Mike Jorgensen (of Illinois), David Bruin (Indiana), and Chelsea Amengual (New York) sit three rows from the stage in the twilight of Robsham Theater. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in late September, they’re trading directions for the best way to get to Newbury Street as they await the start of the first cast meeting of the all-freshman production of Euripides’ The Bacchae.

“Shep, did you hit ‘Reply All?’” the assistant director, Zach Bubolo ’06, asks Sheppard Barnett, the play’s director and the associate director of BC’s theater arts center. Bubolo, a theater major who is volunteering his time to gain experience, is wondering why so few of the 15 cast members are present. Amir Shirazi (Oregon), who is to play an aged, blind soothsayer, hurries in, and soon it is clear that no one else is coming. Barnett, a former professional mime and a veteran of 19 years directing student drama at BC, swings himself down to the edge of the stage and launches into an introduction. He tells the quartet that first-year students “have a hard time” getting cast in theater department shows because they are unknown quantities. The majority work their way up doing scenes for students taking directing classes and in other student productions, before having a chance of being chosen for a main-stage performance. Barnett tells them this production of The Bacchae will fulfill two desires: the theater department’s aim to give freshmen more opportunities, and his own passion to direct a play he has been obsessed with since he took a seminar in Greek play production as an undergraduate at Tufts University some 20 years earlier.

The Bacchae, he says, is a tale of divine revenge. Dionysus, the god of wine, sanity, and theater, takes human form to visit punishment on the people of Thebes for slandering his dead mother, a mortal. Stung into insanity by the god, the city’s women take to the woods and hills to worship him. Dionysus also seeks vengeance on Pentheus, the city’s young king, for forbidding the inhabitants to take part in his rites.

Barnett outlines for the students his idea of using masks and choreographed movement to dramatize Dionysus’ manipulation of the other characters’ perceptions of reality. For example, he explains, at the pivotal moment when the god begins to control Pentheus, Dionysus will play with the king’s mask, then put it back askew to denote his distorted vision. Throughout most of the action in the play, movement will be stylized. “We’re going to learn a little tai chi,” he promises. “I think it will be fun.”

The actors are a mix—likely theater majors, pre-meds, management students, the undeclared. With five and a half weeks to prepare for three performances, November 9–11, they face a grueling rehearsal schedule: sessions every weeknight from 6:30 to 10:00 p.m. and afternoon marathons on Sundays. Because of the demand for theater space on campus, many rehearsals will take place in residence hall lounges on lower campus.

During the first week of rehearsals, the cast members meet in the sixth-floor lounge of Vanderslice Hall. They’ve shifted furniture to one side and are working on a crucial scene: The women of Thebes, bewitched by Dionysus, discover Pentheus spying on their secret rites. A group of them, led by Pentheus’s mother, Agave, who fails to recognize her own son, tear the young king’s body limb from limb.

“I have brought him to you, girls—the one who ridiculed me and my worship. Now you must pay him back,” says Dionysus, played by Jorgensen, whose lean, tall frame and flowing blond locks lend a Viking air. Pentheus, imbued by the dark-haired Bruin with the physical intensity of the all-round athlete he was before discovering a passion for theater late in high school, crouches at his mother’s feet, pleading for his life. In high school, Bruin played John Proctor in The Crucible. Sarah Lucie (California) mainly played nice girls in school musicals, she says, so portraying the crazed Agave is “definitely challenging.”

Forty minutes into the rehearsal, Barnett abruptly changes the game. He has the whole cast sit in a circle on the floor and hands out pages on which the sentences of Dionysus’ prologue are broken into fragments. The students go round the circle, each choppily reading a single word or phrase, a word now and then repeated to give an echo effect, key lines sometimes read in chorus. The idea is that their voices will combine to represent Dionysus in his godlike form, says Barnett.

After several repetitions, Barnett marshals everyone into rows, with a few people at the back standing, those in the middle kneeling, and those in front sitting on the ground to form a pyramid-shaped ensemble. Barnett introduces gestures—hands crossed on chest for “I,” both arms upraised on “lightning.” Words and gestures begin to mesh, awkwardly.

Two weeks later, with opening night less than three weeks away, the cast’s energy seems low, and stress is rising. In Walsh Hall’s seventh-floor lounge, while students on one side of the room eat pizza and clack away on laptops, Barnett puts Shirazi and Michael Mallett (New York) through their scene together as two old men, soothsayer and grandfather of the king. Last week’s rehearsals had foundered in a welter of overcommitment, says Barnett, with half the cast working on the crew of the theater department’s production of The King Stag, by Carlo Gozzi. Bubolo takes Shirazi and Mallett off to refine their movements, while Barnett turns to Alexander Hadshi (Maryland) and his long speech as the messenger recounting Pentheus’s death to the people of Thebes. After a few runs, Barnett tells him, “The good news is, you’re done for the night. The bad news is, you have to be off the book by Sunday.” Hadshi heads for the library, to study for his next day’s Arabic vocabulary test. “It’ll get done,” he says. And it does. The day before Hallow-een, with 10 days to go, everyone is off the book and snapping their fingers for lines.

Whether it’s the effect of having props—fur bandoliers for Dionysus’ followers, the Bacchae, and startling chalk-white masks for everyone except Dionysus—or the fact that with other theater productions wrapped up they now have access to the Vanderslice Cabaret Room with professional-quality sound and lighting, the energy level has picked up visibly. The dismemberment of Pentheus, as the Bacchae closely encircle his prostrate body and make swirling gestures with lengths of red ribbon, is both balletic and chilling.

The performances take place in Gasson 100, where dress rehearsal reveals the acoustics to be problematic, swallowing words and spitting back unintelligible sound as the actors warm up with tongue twisters like “red bugs’ blood, black bugs’ blood.” There is no dressing room, so the players huddle in a nearby hallway. Kyla Fallon (Massachusetts), who has been performing in musical theater since she was six, is torturing Jorgensen’s straight mane into godlike ringlets with curling tongs. Jaimee Banks (New Jersey) worries that his mask needs some last-minute repairs. “I think we’ve bonded a lot,” he says later. “It seems like we really care about each other.”

On opening night, Barnett’s concern about whether there is an audience for freshman drama proves groundless. With 10 minutes to go, the house is full, and latecomers have to sit on the floor. Soon it is time for Dionysus to take human form and descend on Thebes. What follows is truly an ensemble piece, disciplined and fluid. The choral segments that needed so much work in rehearsal are now the dramatic high points, with lines flowing from player to player as if they were indeed all mouths belonging to one intelligence. Sitting in the front row, Fallon’s parents are slightly shell-shocked. They are used to seeing their daughter on stage, they say, but this is a far cry from Oklahoma.

Afterward, cast and crew field high fives and hugs. Most say they plan to audition for the theater department’s forthcoming production of Dario Fo’s We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay. Barnett, who delivered The Bacchae on a shoestring grant from the department to cover rights, publicity, and minimal supplies, is already exploring funding options for a freshman production in fall 2006. A comedy next, he thinks. Perhaps Aristophanes’ The Birds.

Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.

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