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Recent Poly High School graduates Dashiell McFarr and Giorgio Buono wonder why stage plays seem stigmatized by the people they know.
“Why aren’t plays a form of media that’s popular?” McFarr and Buono ask. “Musicals are a big thing, but at least at our age, we’re not like ‘Oh, we’re gonna go see a play.’”
They believe they can solve that problem with their physically comic “The Legend of Mt. Hurr,” a play about a cult of Houdini they say will appeal to younger audiences as well as older and make everyone feel plays are “actually cool.”
“We want to make something that’s accessible across any age range, any demographic of people,” McFarr said. “Something that’s classic, that everyone from a 5-year-old to grandparents would want to come see. We’ll spark a theater revolution.”
After successfully performing “The Legend of Mt. Hurr” at Poly during their senior year, McFarr and Buono — now rising sophomores at their respective colleges — are reprising the play at the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica on Aug. 9.
“Both students showed outstanding talent as creative and hilarious actors,” Poly’s Drama Director Linda Bon said. “They both were in every possible show and experienced many styles of theater over the years.”
Poly’s theater program offers up to four years of progressive academic classes in theater plus after-school plays, poetry slams, improv shows and musicals, Bon said.
During their three years in the program, Buono became captain of the school’s improv team, The Polyesters, and stood out as William Shakespeare in “Something Rotten,” while McFarr shined as Nostradamus in that same production, she said.
Both also wrote and directed their own 10-minute plays while in the program, Bon noted, with McFarr playing the lead rock star in “True Rock” and Buono winning the department award for best play for his satirical “Revelation for the Lamb.”
Their “really cool” process of writing and directing short plays inspired McFarr and Buono to write “The Legend of Mt. Hurr” as a longer play during a creative writing class junior year. McFarr had seen a YouTube video about a cult started by two brothers in the 1960s and — intrigued by how they could get a bunch of people to believe in them — suggested to Buono that they write a play based on that idea.
Buono’s “irrepressible optimism” then convinced Bon to begrudgingly let them stage the play in the school’s theater despite its already full season, she said, having enlisted a group of eager drama students to bring it to life. Audiences “laughed uproariously” and begged for another showing, she said.
“The characters are rustic, the humor cornball, and the characters have such heart and passion you can’t help but fall in love with them, despite their foibles,” Bon said. “But the biting commentary about the gullibility of the masses being conned by Houdini’s lust for power feels simultaneously classic and relevant.”
She credits the play’s success to McFarr’s “sly, intelligent humor” and Buono’s “explosive creativity and strong directorial hand” as well as their chemistry as friends and shared work ethic and persistence.
In the process of revamping the play to perform again with more than a dozen current and former Poly students, McFarr and Buono suddenly realized they had no venue. Finding the Illusion Magic Lounge fit the Houdini angle of the play, though that theater was initially hesitant to allow a student-led production.
“The fact that they secured the Illusion Magic Lounge as a venue is pure genius and gumption,” Bon said. “They really are extraordinary kids.”
But developing their play for this new staging has become a collaborative effort with the cast, McFarr said, something he appreciates.
“It is a total community thing, like everybody has a role in it,” McFarr said. “It would not be what it is without them because there’s gotta be some part of them in their characters.”
During a recent rehearsal in a local park, several of the clearly invested cast members said the play has allowed them to express themselves through acting as their characters.
“I just love that I’m able to be someone I’m not, but I can also put some of myself into different characters, especially in this play,” said cast member Frankie Calderon. “I’m playing a grumpy a–hole and it’s fun to exaggerate that for other people.”
Aubrey Bedford, a rising sophomore and computer science major at Baylor University, says he’s similarly able to showcase a side of himself he doesn’t get to otherwise.
“I’m able to be a lot more eccentric, a lot more bold, a lot more emotional with my performance,” Bedford said.
Bedford said he’s also grateful to reconnect with his Poly drama friends and make new ones, saying it’s been “genuinely beautiful to see the sprouting of interconnectedness” among cast members.
Jaidah Irving, who plays the pastor’s wife and plans to major in psychology with a minor in theater arts as a rising sophomore, says theater offers a place where she can be “100% myself and no one cares.”
“I feel like in the society we’re in, especially in our age group, everything is judged and scrutinized and looked at weird if it’s not the norm,” Irving said. “So, especially as a Black female, I feel like being in theater is definitely a little strange for my community. But I don’t care because it’s the one place where I can truly be myself.”
The students are also conscious that this is their first production outside of a school, which they feel is empowering, and credit McFarr and Buono for making them feel welcome.
“High school is very different from that because you have some peers who want to suppress you and keep you down,” said Calderon. “But these two are allowing — I feel needed.”
Besides emphasizing community, McFarr and Buono said keeping the audience in mind is one of the foundational theater lessons they learned at Poly, and how Charlie Chaplin serves as a model for how physical comedy does that.
Based on a rehearsal scene, the play is dynamic, including actors frequently running across the stage, getting into and out of a barrel and interacting in funny and combative ways.
“You can’t knock physical humor,” McFarr and Buono say, adding that when they wrote the play, they were also conscious of the rhythm and tempo of the language and “beats” in the dialogue, as they had also learned.
“How do we get this across in this amount of syllables?” they had to consider with every line, they said, using Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter as a model but adding their own flavor to it.
Many cast members emphasized how hard McFarr and Buono have been working on the play, late into the night (based on their Instagram postings), inspiring the rest of the cast to make it the “best it can be.”
Though McFarr is majoring in legal studies at Berkeley, he says the experience of reprising this play makes him want to revisit theater and the cooperative embrace it offers.
“I feel like I haven’t really been in a community like this where everybody just wants you to succeed,” he said. “And with acting, you give your whole self to it, and everybody loves you for that. I feel like that’s probably the best part about it.”
“The Legend of Mt. Hurr” will perform on Aug. 9 at 7 p.m. at the Illusion Magic Lounge, 1418 Fourth St., Santa Monica. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased through EventBrite.com. Paid parking is available for $6 across from the venue. Run time is 2 hours, including intermission. Instagram: @Mt.Hurr; TikTok: @thelegendofmthurr