by Carl Hoover | October 7, 2021
When Baylor theater professor Lisa Denman attended a performance of Chelsea Marcantel’s “Airness” at the Humana Festival of New American Plays four years ago, she wasn’t convinced she’d relate to its subject: playing air guitar, where people mimic playing a rock guitar.
A play about air guitar? Really?
“It turns out it was exactly my kind of play,” she recalled. “It was about finding people you love and finding a thing you can be passionate about.”
Flash forward a few years when members of the Baylor University theater faculty were putting together a season in light of COVID-19 and the little play about finding community seemed to fit the times.
Plus, it’s air guitar — uncomplicated fun almost by definition.
Marcantel’s play, whose Baylor Theatre run opens Wednesday night, follows twentysomething Nina (Miquela Lopez), who decides to enter an air guitar competition for the fun of it. What could be hard about pretending to play an imaginary electric guitar to a 60-second track?
Plenty, she discovers. A group of serious air guitarists, ones who regularly appear on an air guitar competition circuit, offer afterwards to show her the finer points of shredding, flailing and wailing.
As she finds, there’s showmanship involved, seen in stage names such as Golden Thunder (Rudy Munoz), Facebender (Dawson Boudreaux), D Vicious (Eduardo Velez), Cannibal Queen (Bethany Johnson) and Shreddy Eddy (Shane Cearnal). There’s imagination and personal expression. There’s, in short, “airness.”
Denman, the play’s director, said its smaller scale made it suitable for Baylor Theatre’s Green Season, smaller productions that alternate with the theater’s bigger Gold Season shows.
In the process of preparing for “Airness,” Denman and her cast tapped into the very real world of air guitar competition. “We watched a lot of air guitar: YouTube has all the various championships,” she said. “The world championship is held in Finland, of all places.”
The point of “Airness,” however, isn’t to mock air guitarists, but to recognize the community that forms from like-minded or like-spirited people. “It basically says ‘Find your people and hang on to them,’” Denman said.
That, plus a lot of great rock guitar licks.
“Airness,” a PG-13 equivalent due to language, opens Wednesday and runs through Oct. 17 at Baylor’s Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center.
