The Veil - Ariel Torres

Having heard all the negative comments from my roommates about the performance they had seen the night before, I tried to keep an open mind when I went to see The Veil on Tuesday, November 1^st. Walking in to the theatre, I noticed it was unusually empty. There were entire rows that were unoccupied, and my own row only included me and a couple of other people. Not the sign of a terribly enticing play, I thought. The play began and I was immediately intrigued by the set design. Though there was only one large room - the living room - that was fully developed, the partial sets that included the small hall between the living room and front door, the staircase and room upstairs, and the back of the living room leading to the outside, expanded the set to provide a larger space in which the story could seamlessly unravel. The intricacy of the display made me feel as though I was truly looking into an old Irish home. The trees situated on the outside in the back of the living room really served to expand the set and it felt like there really was an “outside” in the sense of the play. The lighting effects were also very impressive in that they successfully conveyed different times of day. In the opening of the play, the set was very dark, clearly nighttime and in the next sequence, there was a very realistic sense of morning in the room. The sound effects, too, worked successfully to portray what I felt were very realistic sounds of wind blowing and the effects of the trees and movement also helped. Aside from the setting, however, the rest of the play was generally a disappointing performance. The first scene kept me somewhat captivated. The story did not seem terribly exciting in the first bit, but when they mentioned Hannah and her encounter with loud voices and “seeing things” reminiscent of her deceased father, I was hopeful and thought the story and play could be rather promising. After the initial mention of her supernatural encounters, however, the play held a snail paced trajectory throughout and it felt like I was sitting there for days, just watching the reverend blather on about some letter to Hannah from her soon-to-be father in law – and that was just the first scene.

About the only thing I found exciting about the play was the loud boom in the beginning that followed the reverend’s pleading with the so-called spirit, and that’s only because my attention was beginning to drift and the sound brought me back to the play (and I did get a little scared). What followed was a long series of painfully boring conversations that left me drifting in and out of sleep, and seeing the people sitting by me, I knew I wasn’t the only one. Afterwards, seeing the trailer of the play in class, I was shocked at how interesting and eerie it made the play look and how misleading that trailer was. Though I genuinely tried to go into that play with an open mind, in the end I agreed with my classmates’ general consensus and the most baffling thing about the performance was how I managed to stay awake for the majority of it.