O Lovely Glowworm!

Directed for a senior thesis, the 3 hour long play, O Lovely Glowworm, was probably one of the highlights of my week.  It’s quite a strange play.  Firstly, it is narrated by a stuffed goat.  Secondly, a jumble of events take place that leads the viewer a bit confuzzled and confundled but ultimately very happy at the simultaneous humorous and insightful endings.  It wasn’t the typical play that one would imagine– a cast of 6, performed in a small studio theater in the Walgreen Drama Center, it began with a soliloquy by a stuffed goat with an Irish accent who does not know it is a stuffed goat.  For the next few hours, we partake on a journey unraveling the true identity of this suffering creature, who bespeaks of a pain so deeply felt yet unrecognizable.

I have a friend performing in the play and to see him perform was quite an interesting experience.  I have previously seen a lot of my friends in theatrical productions, playing this part or that, and every time, it takes some getting used to.  As good as they are in their roles, it is still difficult to separate the person that I know from the person that I am watching.  In the first moments of this play, I encountered that same difficulty.  When he was the character, sleeping, I had to stifle a giggle, seeing as he sprawled out on the set, acting the part of a humorous, lounging soldier.  But as the play went on, my vision of my friend as the person I know was replaced by the performance of the character I did not know.  And with that, I became a lot more entrenched in the many facets, rivets, and turns of the production.

The play’s plot in itself is hard to convey– as previously mentioned, it centers on a stuffed goat’s imaginative thought process in reaching the solution to his true identity as a stuffed goat.  He placed himself in various roles– a mother, a dog, a grandfather, etc– and along the way recounts the tales of those whose lives are unknowingly intertwined and all of whom suffer through some kind of unspeakable tragedy within themselves.  Of course, this explanation makes the play sound like some Grecian tragedy where everyone dies in the end, but no, it’s not.  It is extremely hilarious and witty and viewers can’t stop laughing, even in the saddest of moments.

O Lovely Glowworm is play, however, that yet again teaches something so subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) to humanity, inviting the audience to endure and persevere in their own lives, to suffer and live through the worst moments in their lifetimes to reach the happiness that could be at the end.  To live for those things other than oneself, to have faith in that which is not visibly apparent nor scientifically evident, to be at peace with what and whom one is instead of always striving to be something or someone that one is not and perhaps shall never be.  In a season where Christmas quickly approaches and Winter sets its snow in ice, O Lovely Glowworm was a wonderfully befitting story reminding us that to be human is to love and be strong.