The Independent Drama Society started on shaky ground. Founded by a bunch of BU grads newly ineligible for the theatre groups they'd come to love in college, IDS cobbled together its earliest productions, recruiting inexperienced players and volunteer tech teams to put on plays with few resources and small audiences. The result was some very unbalanced productions. 2009's
Oresteia, for instance, sported two excellent performances from the 21-year-olds playing Orestes and Electra (Nicanor Campos and Sarah Gazdowicz) but the rest of the production left tons to be desired.
In their second season, IDS hurled itself wholeheartedly into the grownup indie theatre scene, raising audition standards and expanding their resources. By the time
The Shape of Things went up in the Factory Theatre, the company had managed to pull itself up to professional standards without losing the edgy passion of its founding principles (it had also held onto its best talents while expanding the acting pool). This fall's
Romeo and Juliet made those truths all the more clear. A young but uniformly talented company pulled off a demanding production that not only embraced the company's desperate passion but actually celebrated it with a relatively low budget romp of good fun with great actors.
But it wasn't until
Glengarry Glen Ross premiered this month at the BCA Plaza Black Box that I fully got the fact that IDS has arrived. I mean, it's always been here (well, since 2007 it has) but I've always thought of it as a sort of College Plus company. The company is still young, but it no longer seems tied to recent graduates the way it has been. Nowadays they're working with more money, grownup characters, more experienced actors.
Glengarry's youngest actor, Adam Lauver (23) was one of
Romeo and Juliet's most mature presences and here shares the stage with a company of honest-to-god adults. I don't mean to take away from the company's other more recent productions (
Proof had Mark Bourbeau as Robert and much of the point of
Romeo and Juliet was its youthful cast) but the characters in
Glengarry aren't, for the most part, brazen upstarts or foolish youths, they're worn down, trod upon working stiffs- a show like that isn't a job for a College Plus company. With
Glengarry Glen Ross, in more ways than one, IDS seems to have grown up, or perhaps just grown into itself.
Read on for our review of the production
Before we announce the winners of the 2010 My Theatre Awards, we're proud to present the My Theatre Nominee Interview Series.
