"Electric" excitement surrounds winter play

December 16, 2011

By Kyle Brown
Entertainment Editor
Prospect’s winter play, “The Electric Man,” was shown last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. “The Electric Man” is about the life of inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla.

Director John Meyers, Jr. wrote the play himself after contemplating the idea for about 15 years beforehand, when he first heard about Tesla.

“He’s a very interesting individual,” Meyers said. “The more I learned about him, the more fascinating I found him to be, and the more I looked at his life, the more I saw that it was filled with interesting characters, dramatic situations and the sort of themes that make for good drama, quite frankly. I didn’t change a lot to make it fit on the stage.”
Some of the famous characters included in “The Electric Man” include J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, James Westinghouse and Mark Twain. Getting all those characters on stage requires a large cast, with some members playing multiple roles.

According to Meyers, there are at least 75 people involved in the production, which can make rehearsals difficult at times.

“Even a simple thing like making a joke, as awesome as that can be, can derail the whole

rehearsal,” Meyers said.

Junior Keagan Anderson, while he only plays one character, that character, Tesla himself, is in every single scene, so rehearsing the three hour production can be a strain on him at times.

“It’s worth every second,” Anderson said. “[But] it’s a lot of physical and emotional drain being on stage for that long a time because [I] can never break character. And I know I’m being a little bit of a crybaby about this, but, you know, it is a lot of work.”

Fortunately, the audience received the performance well, despite its length.

“I think they thought it was really interesting,” freshman Paul Flanders said. “It was a new concept they had never really heard of before, so they didn’t know what to think, but I think they enjoyed it.”

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"Electric" excitement surrounds winter play

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