Last night, the second weekend of the Mask & Bauble Society’s hit production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee began in Poulton Hall. Playing every night at 8 through Saturday, this musical-cum-improv comedy show transforms a boring county spelling bee into a rollicking, irreverent evening of song and spelling. The show also involves audience participation in the bee, so if you want to steal the stage this weekend, brush up on your Merriam-Webster before heading to Poulton. The Voice‘s review of the production is here. Tickets are $8 for students, $12 for everyone else.

Jed Feiman’s (COL ‘12) Typhoid Fever, the feature of this year’s Donn B. Murphy One Acts Festival, has high ambitions. Too bad it barely reaches them.

Typhoid Fever follows the relationships between Ken (Joe Napier, COL ’14), a young New York playwright, and four other twenty-somethings at a New York art gallery. Through these bizarre and self-serious interactions, Ken learns to relax and not worry about others’ opinions of his work.

Feiman’s point would be admirable if it were subtler. The single-faceted Herschel (Joe Brown, COL ’11 and Maria Zoulis, COL ’12), for example, is overly melodramatic; the audience chuckles at him rather than with him. Herschel is presented as a weirdo who Ken—and the audience—should strive not to be.

As a result, Typhoid Fever seems to reflect conformist facets of Georgetown culture; hipsters are weird, artists are weirder, and hipster artists are the weirdest. One should accede instead of rebelling because, somehow, conformists care least about what others think about them. Feiman tried to explore conformity from a unique perspective, but propagates and blocks his message with Hershel’s antics.

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