Jumping into the pool
Curtain up on the Adams Pool Theatre, former home of the naked swim, now home to undergraduate directors creative enough to practice theater where Franklin Roosevelt practiced his breaststroke. Enter, stage left, a spring semester senior crazy enough to write, direct, and stage an adapted work in this performance space, where the audience sits on a ramp that used to lead into the water, and the actors are in the deep end (or off it). Preproduction of “Take Her, She’s Mine” began last October. I found the script in the Widener Library stacks and was struck by its thematic relevance. The show, a 1961 Broadway hit, follows a California girl to a fictional women’s college, dramatizing her experience with her cautious father, sophisticated roommates, changing times, and Ivy League boys. Women have taken vast strides in the 50 years since the original production, but the play’s depiction of the female Ivy...