Upcoming play: Hilarious quest for success
The fast-paced play transforms the Center for the Arts performance hall into a motivational seminar being conducted by Jane, with theater-goers as a studio audience. As Jane leads the seminar, the scenes of her frantic, up-and-down carrot-chasing life appear as flashbacks on the stage. At the end of all the fun lie some powerful lessons about life and happiness.
“It’s a way to laugh at failure and see it as a doorway to real success. You often learn more about yourself through failure than you do through success,” noted local playwright Kathleen Vinlove.
Through her struggle, Jane intermittently hears a disembodied “voice from above” urging her to keep pushing harder for more and more worldly success and external validation — with cries of “Run, Jane, run.” At other times, “Little Jane,” her childhood self, now and then steps onstage, sometimes voicing the skewed cultural messages about success and happiness that were embedded into her when she was small.
MET decided for the first-time ever to produce an original play after Vinlove’s script drew resounding feedback from an MET committee of readers for its “beautiful writing, hilarity and relevance,” according to MET’s Trish Clark.
“I loved the idea that the play’s hero almost found success accidentally. Jane tried very hard to have a game plan and do things in an orderly way, and when she was forced to abandon all that, she found happiness,” Clark said.
After Jane’s dismissal from her high-powered executive post, she turns her characteristic high energy to housecleaning, eventually rising from the ashes of layoff to build Tidy Troopers, an $85 million corporate hive with 2,500 worker bees. She notices that her housekeeper, Trudy, has a serenity and poise that Jane, as a corporate warrior, never enjoyed, and Jane is inspired to author a book, “Sainthood and the Art of Vacuuming,” promising Nirvana through intense housecleaning. The book is noticed and plugged by an Oprah-like talk show host and becomes a runaway bestseller.
But then the problems of life return to Jane. She finally comes to understand that the external trappings of worldly success do not in themselves bring happiness or true success – qualities that must come from within. She also realizes that failure can be a tool for revealing to a person the need to change internally and thus it leads to success, or, as actor Mickey Rooney once put it, “You always pass failure on the way to success.”
What results is a second book, reflecting her revised philosophy: “Beyond Vacuuming: The Joy of Failure,” extolling the use of failure as a springboard to personal growth and true fulfillment.
Well-known Middle Tennessee actress Areta Trahan puts starpower in the lead role under the direction of MTSU theater professor Deborah Anderson.
Show times are 7:30 p.m. May 22 through 24, May 30 and 31. Matinees at 2 p.m. are on May 25 and June 1. Tickets are $10 general admission, $8 students and seniors, except for the May 22 preview, when admission is $5 for everyone.
Armed with a small grant, the MET is offering seminars after a performance on May 25.