The New Vision Association will present “Country Grammar,” the fourth installment of “The ‘It'” at 8 p.m. Friday in Perry Paige Auditorium.
The play is a series of monologues with an overlapping theme. This show will focus on the inability to reach one’s full potential.
“Country Grammar” is set in a nameless country town where the characters are trapped.
They are not physically trapped, but emotionally or mentally bound to their town.
One character, “Michelle,” played by Angela Roberson, is a recent high school graduate who is in love with “Julian.” Although Michelle has the opportunity to leave the area and go to Atlanta she does not want to leave her boyfriend.
Show writer and director DeAldon Watson, 20, a junior theater education student from Houston, said the idea for the play came from “observing people who feel like, for whatever reason, they can’t leave where they’re from.”
He said he hopes the play will inspire people to help those they know in similar situations.
Performances by poets, dancers and a singer serve as interludes between monologues.
So what exactly is “It?”
“‘It’, is the invincible character that moves the play,” said series founder Tara Lake, 23, a graduate student from Hillside, N.J.
“He is the one all the monologue characters speak to. The It gets them to the truth.”
Every year “The ‘It'” has a new theme.
“The show is updated to reflect what’s going on in the student body,” said cast member DeAngela Roberson, 19, a senior business student from Orlando.
“I wanted to do something that was just about the art. Just about the theatre.
Just about the singing,” Lake said.
True to the tradition of “The ‘It,'” “Country Grammar” doesn’t have a costume designer and the set consists of a stage, piano and some microphones.
It offers no distractions from “the art.”