CFHS presented the Drama Department’s Fall production of Once Upon A Bride There Was a Forest from November 8th to November 10th, and was directed by Deborah Hansen and Marcus Salley. The play was centered around a girl named Josie, who is soon to be married and wants to find her estranged father in order to invite him to the wedding. On her journey, she stumbles upon a strange house with strange people and her father, who doesn’t recognize her. As she tries to get close to him to figure out why he doesn’t recognize her, his wife, the head of the household, removes Josie’s ability to speak in an attempt to keep her father in the home. At the end, we realize that the entire play was in her head, and when her father ‘left’ her at age twelve, he actually died and she imagined everything in order to say her goodbyes and get her closure so she could move on with her life.

Adriana Talkington played the main character, Josie. Talkington gave a phenomenal performance; it was clear that she was really connecting with her character. The way that she carried herself and engaged really stuck out. In the beginning, she was so determined and destined to find her dad that she wasn’t even going to let her fiance get in the way. She was going to leave him for two weeks just to search for her father. When she got into the house, she was assertive with trying to get close to her dad and dealing with his new wife. Once the wife had enough, and she cut out Josie’s tongue, Talkintons’s’s scream was piercing and her attachment to her character was obvious.  In the moments she was angry, passionate and fed up her acting stuck out the most. You could hear it in her voice and see it in her body language that she was really feeling and acting according to Josie’s character, not Talkington’s personality.

The setup of the stage and scenes played a large part in the telling of the story. The sets in the play are fragmented and in ruins, just like Josie’s mind. I feel it was set this way in order to further set the scene and plot. If everything was perfect and orderly, it would seem to good to be true almost. In scenes like the diner scene where Josie is on set but not interacting with the other actors, it gives you the feel that she’s aware of what’s going on but since she’s lost her voice and is in a dream world, she has no control over it. They also give the audience a feel of how she’s feeling: broken, torn and incomplete. Without her dad, she feels like a part of her is missing.

In my opinion, the play was absolutely phenomenal. It was an amazing performance and the cast, directors, and stage crew put on an amazing production. Not only was it a great production, but when Josie’s voice was taken away, not only did we get to view her character through actions not voice (which certainly speaks to Talkington’s acting), but we also got a brilliant lesson from it and how she had to handle having her tongue taken from her. When her voice is taken away, we see even more of how she is feeling because actions speak louder than words. I feel as if her voice being taken away goes to show that we are in charge of how our life ultimately flows . If you need to tell someone something, just do it. You can’t wait around expecting things to come to you because we’re not promised that ending. I look forward to seeing more work from this amazingly talented group of people!