I went to see the performance piece “Missing You Metropolis” on Friday, Feb. 22. The audience consisted of very few people because of the weather and snow day, but I got to sit behind Gary Jackson who the main character of the play was based off.

Gary Jackson is a Washburn alum and the author of the poetry collection “Missing You, Metropolis” that was adapted into a play by several members of Washburn’s Theatre and English Departments.

I find it very hard to give a synopsis of the show because it’s not a traditional play when it comes to the sequencing of the performance. In this performance, the plot revolves around main character Gary Jackson and some of the challenges that he had in his younger years in Topeka.

Some of these challenges include the death of his sister and his best friend committing suicide. The twist of this performance is that the plot weaves in different poetry pieces from his book in between the stages of his life. These poetry pieces involved superheroes, villains and the women who are in relationships with the superheroes that deals with struggles in their own lives.

This show had lots for the audience to look at and speculate. It had great images projected at the back of the stage for certain poems that helped portray the meaning. Some of the backstage projections of people doing shadows on the screen were either a hit or miss though. The pantomiming was also hard to follow.

Overall, the best impressions that I received from the performance piece were the scenes that involved the main character Gary and his best friend Stuart.

They had the most real interactions of the entire play because these two characters connected the most with one another.

Jason Jones, who played Gary Jackson, was wonderful at his presentational style of acting. Mike Guliford played the character Stuart and did a really good job. His pantomiming created a great shadow experience near the end of the show.

This play was a very interesting play, but I believe that the sequencing of the play made it confusing. The switching between poems to the story line just threw me and made it hard for me to fully understand the plot.

Kara Protasio,  [email protected], is a sophomore mass media major.