September 23, 1980

Claiming that “Woody Allen is never done here; the drama department tends to do classics,” a new student troupe, Stageblood Productions, presented two of his short works “Death Knocks” and “Mr. Big,” as dinner theatre in Matthew’s Mug. In the first offering, “Death Knocks,” Death, clad in a black robe and Nike running shoes, visits Nat Ackerman, a Brooklyn dress manufactuer. Death loses a gin rummy game while answering or not answering Nat’s questions: “What’s it like?” “What’s what like?” “Death.” “What should it be like? You fall down.”

In “Mr. Big,” adapted by Alan Katz ’81 from a short story and, said Pam Keogh ’83, writing in The Miscellany News, a “decidedly more abitiious piece,” Claire Rosensweig—perhaps a Vassar student—and Kaiser Lupowitz, “a Humphrey Bogart-Sam Spade character” she hires for $100 a day and expenses “plus a dinner date,” search New York City for God, in order to add authenticity to a paper on Him for her philosophy class—and because “My dad’s promised me a Mercedes if I get straight A’s.” “The dialogue,” Keogh wrote, “is witty and, to the occasionally untutored philosopher, a little hard to follow. But majors and non-majors alike should enjoy this one.”

Stageblood Productions continued offering theater presentations in Matthew’s Mug of works by, among others, Neil Simon and David Mamet throughout the year.