With sun, surfing, and skin, it would seem that Spring Break was happening all over again. Though Spring Break won’t happen for another year, Mesa State’s Experimental Theater will bring all the fun under the sun and then some with the production, “Psycho Beach Party” by Charles Busch.
“There’s a lot of different issues in the show, gay rights, general respect, there’s a lot more that meets the eye,” Student Director Claire Schaefer said.
The author of the play put twists into the production that Schaffer felt were historic and relevant to keep in the production at Mesa State.
”He himself is a drag queen and in the original stage production of the show he played the lead character, Chicklet, a female. We do have a person in the show that is in drag – the mother of the main character is played by a man. I decided to keep that part alive because it was a very important part of the show,” Schaefer said.
She describes her role “a decision maker – I either do or do not allow everything that happens in the show,” she said “After choosing the show, the next step after that was deciding the people that I want to design the show. I chose people that were excited and passionate about it.”
Schaffer felt very fortunate to be awarded the opportunity to be a student director.
“We are really lucky here because we have two directing classes where we direct two one-acts and then have the opportunity to propose a show. We write up what we want to do with the show, what you’re going to need, you come up with a preliminary budget, and your own set design then our professors go through each of the proposals and decide those that will be most promising. It’s a really competitive process,” she said.
Schaefer is responsible for everything from the actors within the play to overseeing the set design and lighting, and even allowing the actors to have long boards acting as surfboards gliding across the stage.
Bathing suits, long boards, and a surf side set would sound like enough reasoning to bring this production to Mesa State. However, Schaefer chose Psycho Beach Party more as an opportunity for students to have more real- world experience within their future acting careers.
“A lot of times, in college and when you’re younger, you are asked to plat people that are older than what you are and for many of us here, students want to go on and audition for film, for television, where they are not going to be playing, 30, 40 year old people. They are going to be playing people that are their own age,” she said.

Schaefer herself played a 60-year-old woman in the production Oklahoma and expressed the difficulty of portraying a character of that age as a college-aged student.
“It’s been a really long time since there are people that are our age or younger in the productions we have done here. Most of the people in this show are younger, they are high school age. So it is giving the actors a different kind of challenge with not acting older, but younger,” Shaefer said.
Senior Scot Cahoon appreciated the opportunity to play a character closer to his own age. “It is a lot easier, you just got to be you up there with some slight adjustments to your character,” Cahoon said. His character, Starcat, is a high schoolstudent who helps the main character overcome a troubling and sickly humorous disorder after he becomes an object of her affection.
“When you play age, you have to research what kind of person the character was and go talk to professors about what kind of physicalities a person of the given age would play. I‘ve never performed a role that was more than couple of years different from my own age,” Cahoon said.
Though the production allows the students to perform as a character closer to their own age, this does not make the production more simple and especially for Mary Compton whose character really consists of six.
The show begins March 31 and continues on April 1-2. Tickets can be purchased at the Mesa State Box Off