Tag Archives: Rumors

On Being A Car Headlight: Backstage at Rumors

Emily Sillars ’15 doesn’t have the most glamorous job in the Rumors cast. If she’s very good at it, no one in the audience will even know she’s there—her small part will simply weave another thread in the magic cloth of the play.

When stage manager Minh Do ’13 tells her the cue through a headset—cue five, or six, or 12—Sillars tips a giant light mounted on a pole and spins it toward the stage windows.

“To me, it just looks like this,” says the soft-spoken Sillars, and she spins the light toward the windows. During the show, the beam plays across the interior of a sophisticated New York mansion. Or at least that’s what it looks like to the audience. From Sillars’ perch backstage, all she can see is an unfinished wall, full of exposed joists and beams.

“I can’t tell what it looks like at all,” Sillars says, adding with a gesture at the room beyond, “It all works together and makes this place.”

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Q&A with Rumor’s Laura McCullagh

Chris Gorman from Rumors

This fall, the Williston Northampton Theater Program presents Rumors, a farce by Neil Simon. The play, which runs through the weekend of Oct. 27, examines the world of upper class New Yorkers through the lens of a high end anniversary party where everything that can go wrong, does. A few days before the play’s opening night, Williston’s student blogger Brendan Hellweg ’14 took a short break from Beyond the Binder to sit down with actor Laura McCullagh ’13 to talk about her role, her costume, and how she’d react if stuck in an elevator with her character, Chris Gorman.

BH: What do you like most about acting as your character?

I really love that she is very different from me as a person. I’m one of those people who in a crisis situation will sit down and think of every possible way to solve it and then figure out which way is the best to go about doing things and she just panics and everything goes out the window. It’s really fun to play with that aspect of her – that she’s absolutely crazy.

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