The one-man show is perhaps the most difficult, and perhaps the most rewarding, form of stage entertainment. There’s a space. There’s an audience. As the actor, its your job to transform that big, empty space into something shared by yourself and that audience. This, needless to say, is a daunting task.

Camille Cettina ’01, Sara Nixon-Kirshner SC ’01 and Maeve Sullivan SC ’01 took it on this weekend in their joint senior acting recital, Girls Girls Girls.

"In any man that dies there dies with him / his first snow and kiss and fight... / Not people die but worlds die in them." Sara began her piece by projecting this statement on the screen. As the title and quote indicate, what followed was a half-hour exploration of what it is to deal with death. The format with which Nixon-Kirschner chose for this exploration was interesting and tightly executed. All together there were nine different characters, all played by Sara, all but three of them her own creations. These characters were of disparate ages and situations, specifically vis-à-vis death. In one piece, " Miss Manners," a Steel Magnolias-esque Southern woman gives advice on funeral etiquette. Her advice on death: "Just don’t think about it." In another segment, Harriet, a young child, is interrogated about death by an offstage voice, presumably while her aunt undergoes heart surgery. This was particularly affecting. Harriet’s naïveté was at times amusing, but mostly the minimalist lighting and incessant probing by the offstage personality made the entire scene very uncomfortable to watch.

A similar spell pervaded all of the monologues, mixing humor and despair in a surprising sophisticated manner. The grieving characters were moving, even if their eloquence in the face of death occasionally brought the performative aspect uncomfortably near the surface.

Overall, "The End" was by far the best of the three. It was personal, but also professional. The monologues fit together nicely and both the production and pacing were tight. Perhaps if it had been the last performance, "The End" would have been a little too heavy handed for the tired audience. Fortunately, this was not the case.

The real area of difficulty was in the pieces written in archaic language (Shakespeare, St. Vincent Millay). Nixon-Kirschner’s voice has an unavoidably modern jadedness which sounded accordingly out of place in the period pieces. Besides that, the acting was terrific. And even when it wasn’t, Sarah’s stage presence made her fun to watch.

Maeve Sullivan’s piece, entitled "Qu’est ce-que tu veux boire?" / "Toi" was not nearly so fun. Maeve has an amazing voice. Stunning, in fact. It was, unfortunately, not used to much effect in this weekend’s performance.

The choice of French pieces (two of the five), while exciting for those of in the audience who spoke French, effectively put the show on pause for those who did not. Choosing segments so inaccessible to most of the audience had the effect of making Maeve’s entire performance feel very scholastic, "recital"-ish. Moreover, while in the program Maeve indicates that the sentiments should be clear despite the language barrier, this was not at all the case. The first of her French language pieces, "Amorphe d’Ottenburg," starring Maeve and Adam Teicholz ’01 was overly long and very confusing (even for French speakers). It also suffered greatly from the total lack of chemistry between Teicholz and Sullivan, and Sullivan’s tendency to indicate all changes in emotion by an elaborate slowing down or rushing of her delivery.

This was a problem throughout the entire performance, Maeve often exuding a kind of adolescent melodrama where it clearly did not belong. Camus’s Meursault, for example, should bear no resemblance to Angela Chase on "My So-Called Life." Maeve’s Meursault did.

And while there is something very appealing about the character of the adolescent who’s seen too much, it was all too present throughout, undermining what may have been distinct about the individual characterizations.

In all, the idea was interesting. The choice to begin and end with excerpts from the beginning and end of Camus’s L’etranger could have brought out the alienation, stress and modern desperation apparent in all of the central characters. Unfortunately, the execution was not there.

The same sort of criticism could be applied to the third and final performance, Camille Cettina’s "Lucid." This last segment was conceptually the most ambitious. The result was that what worked, worked very well, while the aspects that were less smooth changed the shape of the whole surface.

"Lucid" was a meditation on madness, on the texture of madness. Not madness of the screaming Ophelia variety (though that was in there, too), but the little grating madnesses of everyday life; the constant and varying insanity present in every pet peeve, every bout of tears, and of course, every daily obsession. The madness of performance–from that which we enact to ourselves in our own heads, to performances on a real stage.

Thus, Camille began by methodically slamming bathroom scales into a three quarter circle around the stage, effectively creating her own, specifically defined space. With the arena for the show thus marked out, there followed a cartoonish opening sequence, in which Camille dances around the circle pushing a cart with a cake on top.

The subsequent segments bore titles such as "The Art of Relative Beauty," "The Liquid World of Words," "Nobody Wants Desperation," and "The Still Point of Turning." The words spoken in each segment were the result of a careful splicing together of excerpts from J.D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare and many more.

The effect of this project was sometimes very powerful. The spacing of the scales on the floor was just right so that, though they clearly confined, they also made something of an interior safe space, like a chalk circle in fairy tales. This, along with the endless repetition and patching together of phrases, effectively transformed the literal stage into the space of the inner life. Confused, fragmented, timeless. A refuge and a prison. Moreover, the very redrawing of the visual boundaries, served to highlight the strangeness of a situation where the interior is performed.

However, the cost of such complexity is often a sacrifice in clarity. Camille’s character, sometimes engaging the space, sometimes serving as a mere conduit for other voices, was often so disjointed in her speech that not only was it impossible to understand the words she was saying, but the force of her presence was also lost. Moreover, Camille as an actress was perhaps not the best suited for this role. Throughout the show, Camille’s voice and movement repeatedly depreciated the spell cast by her words and staging. More often than not, she tried to do too much with her voice, and convey too much with her body. As a result, it was the effort that showed, and not the intended expression.

Despite all of its problems, "Lucid" was powerful, and an invigorating contrast to the straight play format offered up by the department productions. In fact, that could go for all three pieces. Overall, the first may have been the cleanest and the most well acted. The second, though weak in terms of the range of what it had to offer, nonetheless benefited immensely from the sheer power of Sullivan’s stunning voice. The third, the most ingenious, was also the most troubled.

All three shows were exceptionally personal. All three had their highs and lows. In the end, Girls Girls Girls was a powerful reminder of just how difficult filling a stage really is. It is when "the word becomes flesh" that magic happens. This weekend’s performances, though uneven, had magic to spare.