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Oh. Wait a minute.
Put the tuxes away. Pry yourselves from those dresses. At this prom, the kids don athletic uniforms under sports coats or dresses. Their knee-high athletic socks are cut at the toes and heels. They wear lampblack under their eyes, like gridiron stars in Sunday sunlight. And they dance, posture and die of a thousand self-doubts in a ballroom with a football field for a floor.
This is the PROM of New Paradise Laboratories, the experimental troupe that last examined another right-to-party rite of passage in BATCH, a mesmerizing hit of the Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe in September. That was a bachelor party, New Paradise fashion: heavy on multimedia, heavy on character shifts, heavy on sex - heavy, man.
A football contest is the metaphor for PROM, with the teachers on one side always challenging the kids and assaulting them with aphorisms. The opposing prom celebrants bubble with youth's blind optimism and their own profound hang-ups.
When the graduating seniors go too far on the dance floor or in their exuberance, out pops a referee to announce the infraction, diagram the problem, determine the penalty.
PROM is so physically fluent and demands such precision, it's every bit as much dance as theater. It's funny and bittersweet - and eerie for the roundabout, stylized way it forces your own teenhood into the front of your thoughts. Plus, PROM is different for New Paradise: The subject is high school ritual and senior-class angst, so the show smartly refrains from reckless trading in sexuality, a general mark of the group's creations.
In fact, among its many attributes, PROM's innocence is sweetest. The show was conceived by New Paradise's artistic director, Whit MacLaughlin, a sought-after director of children's shows when he's not working on another planet with New Paradise. I don't know how one artistic side informs his other, but PROM confirms it: The two somehow mesh.
MacLaughlin directed and choreographed the show with Lee Ann Etzold, and he also designed the evocative sound - integral to the production, with mood music, boisterous cheering, and recorded dialogue of stuff rattling around in characters' minds.
There's even a little pre-show (come 15 minutes early) at which the teachers think aloud about their own proms while reacting in front of photos from that storied night. Eight actors play the school staff with brio and include veteran Tom McCarthy as the principal, Lenny Haas, New Paradise regular Aaron Mumaw, and Chaz Rose as the convincing referee.
All 10 high school celebrants are Drexel students, who play wonderfully edgy, distinct characters. They've impressively taken on - and they excel in - roles that call for the dynamic sort of performance PROM demands. They can't just portray these characters; they have to think them through intensely while they dance and act them. And in the audience, you'll think them through, too, if you want the complete experience.