Editor's note: “The Hobbit” will be staged at 4 p.m. Sunday. The Friday and Saturday shows have been cancelled due to weather.
BROOKINGS – A cast of 20-plus student actors of the Brookings High School Drama Department is bringing a children’s fantasy to the stage of the V.A. Bell Auditorium as its spring play.
“The Hobbit,” adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel of the same name published in 1937, will be staged at 4 p.m. Sunday.
Above, Bilbo Baggins (Joey Daly) has just found “the ring of power” lost by Gollum (Lily Palo), a lonely, scared creature, in a scene from the dress rehearsal of “The Hobbit,” on Tuesday evening in V.A. Bell Auditorium of Brookings High School. Finding the ring allows Bilbo to begin taking on some hero-like qualities.
Directed by English instructors Carrie Oorlog and Thomas Moudry, the play follows the adventurous quest of hero and hobbit Bilbo Baggins and a motley crew of 13 dwarves in the world of Middle Earth encountering magic and dragons as they pursue a treasure. (Hobbits, by the way, are a human-like race, but smaller in stature than us and with hairy feet.)
There have been several stage adaptations of “The Hobbit.” The BHS directors opted for Patricia Gray’s version.
“We read it, and we liked it,” Moudry said. “We just liked the content, and we liked what it focused on. We liked what is necessarily left out; because obviously some things would have to be left out. Also it’s the version that Tolkien himself approved.”
The play runs about two hours, with an intermission.
A challenge for bringing “The Hobbit” to the stage is condensing and capturing the theme and plot of this classic 300-page novel.
“What I saw is that she took out certain things that would be difficult to do on a stage,” Moudry explained. “She still kept Bilbo Baggin’s heroic journey intact. So you still see him going from this very sort of insular life to this more adventurous life. You really see that develop over the course of the play. And that’s really pretty cool.”
There’s plenty of action throughout. The costuming is well done. The sound effects are realistic. And the stark setting of the stage, done by design, adds to the adventure.
“That’s something that Mrs. Oorlog and I like to do,” Moudry said. “We like a stark stage and we like to do things where the audience has to imagine the walls and the scenery a bit more. That’s the kind of work Mrs. Oorlog was trained in.”
