The newfound Wheaton parody play, “A GATRA Named Desire,” debuted in the Lyon’s Den this past Thursday. The reading caused the Den to reach maximum capacity and ran for approximately 40 minutes.
The play was co-written by Emily Bergmann ’16 and Audrey Dubois ’17. Bergmann took initiative in writing the play two years ago when she was waiting at Cable Car Cinema in Providence with friend Alexandra Natale ’16. During a conversation about play titles, Natale mentioned “A GATRA Named Desire” in passing.
Bergmann kept a Google Doc of the play and began writing it last year, soon realizing how massive the project was and asked Dubois to co-write the play with her. They finished the play two weeks before the reading. Bergmann described “A GATRA Named Desire” as a compilation of “what we openly hate and, maybe, secretly love” about Wheaton.
“A GATRA Named Desire” featured a cast including Joe Nelson (Chris Truini ’16), a GATRA driver (Maggie Darin ’19), Gross Girlfriend (Kate Gannon ’16) and Gross Boyfriend (Ebony Kennedy ’19) respectively as well as a gym dude (Asher Trout ’17). Some stage directions were read by Bergmann throughout the reading.
The play consisted of various students getting on and off the normal GATRA bus route and interacting with each other. Average subject discussion included going home on the weekends to water houseplants, maneuvering the bus through a “concrete kingdom” accompanied with devil-esque tongue flicks and the fact that no one attends BAC movie nights.
Video of the performance was taken and will be posted for the public in the near future.