Alumni, faculty, families and students settled into the seats of the Gladys Mullenix Black Theatre as Liz Colarte, ’17, put on her one-woman show, “As Good As It Gets,” during Allegheny’s Blue & Gold weekend on Sept. 20 and Sept. 21.
The play follows an unsatisfied and ungrateful young woman who walks through the cracks of life. It’s the small things she doesn’t want to be a part of, like the Monday movie nights at her job. She is bored, and as she mentioned in the play, she wants something to happen to her so her life isn’t as boring as she makes it sound. The show took the audience on a journey as they watched the character realize that life is what you make of it.
President Ron Cole, ’87, was there to view the show.
“First of all, the talent was astounding,” Cole said after Friday’s performance. “I appreciated how what she was presenting was intersectional across generations, you know, like the notion of working with ‘old people’ and then learning from them. I was taken by the weaving of life perspectives across time. I don’t know anybody that’s done a one person show.”
Lightboard operator Cameron Medvitz, ’27, had a great time working on the play.
“Working on the crew of ‘As Good As It Gets’ was an amazing experience (and) to get to see an alum thrive on stage was great,” Medvitz said.
The show was geared toward adults, touching on serious problems and occasionally explicit subject matter. Colarte’s character covered her dismal love life, dissatisfaction with her job, rocky relationship with her mom and even anal sex, which served as bookends to the performance.
Colarte jumps from persona to persona as hers explains her narrative, sometimes acting as an old man named Maurice and sometimes acting as an immigrant from South America. Intersectionality, as mentioned by Cole, was a huge factor in Colarte’s work. She used this idea of interconnection of multiple identities to emphasize the fact that different perspectives are important in forming her character’s own life, especially in recognizing her age, race and socioeconomic status as multiple factors in a single identity.
For Elizabeth Dyer, ’25, who attended Saturday, the performance was a good time.
“I really enjoyed it,” Dyer said. “It was a good mix of funny and also really meaningful coming of age feelings. It reminded me of ‘Fleabag’ in the best way possible. It had those elements of feeling confused in life and finding womanhood, while also having some type of humor. I liked it.”
Dyer called the play funny for good reason. In the press release and the posters that advertised the show, Colarte called the piece “a wet punch of comedy.”
Medvitz agreed with the characterization.
“It was a rib tickling time,” Medvitz said.
As Colarte’s character seemed to go crazy during the performance, audience members sat at the edge of their seats waiting for her to finally make the right decision, and that she did. At the end of the show, her character quits her “horrible” job, starts her career and apologizes to the people she needed to.
Colarte recently performed the piece in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the annual Fringe Festival, a gathering of performers designed to highlight the work of smaller actors and writers. A variety of shows are put on throughout theaters in the city depending on the genre of the art. The website for the festival calls it an “explosion of creative energy from around the globe.”
An ocean away from Scotland, Colarte’s Allegheny audience was excited.
“I was genuinely impressed with the energy,” Cole said.
The tickets for the show were pay-what-you-will and the donations went to Colarte’s future performances.
The Playshop Theatre has two upcoming productions to finish off their fall season. Written by Professor of Communication Arts/Theater Beth Watkins, “An Afternoon of Crankies” will be performed Oct. 6 at 2 p.m. in the Montgomery Auditorium.
“The piece is a wonderfully imaginative means of theatrical storytelling,” said Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and Playshop Director Mark Cosdon about the upcoming play in an email to The Campus.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Rachel Hoey will also put on “A Year with Frog and Toad,” a musical meant to tell the story of best friends Frog and Toad, from the children’s book series by Arnold Lobel, from Nov. 8 to Nov. 10.