A young woman sits at a piano while her mother rapidly types the words she sings. It seems like the set-up of a sweet domestic scene, but it is anything but. That was the general theme of “The Contest,” Hillel Theater Group’s fall semester show, which was put on in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater this past weekend. 

“The Contest,” Shirley Lauro’s 2000 play, follows the Greens during World War II. The Greens are a Midwestern, Jewish family that is struggling to get by. The family’s matriarch, Lily (Abby Kirshbaum ’16), is desperate to move up in social status. However, her immigrant husband Joe (Alex Peters ’18) works a dead-end job that he hates in a munitions factory. Meanwhile, Lily’s sister Gert (Laura Goemann ’19) and her husband Louie (Eli Esrig ’19) are very wealthy — wealthy enough that they can pursue membership at the “goy” (non-Jewish) country club. In hopes of making some easy money, Lily obsessively enters contests on cereal boxes and candy bar wrappers, eventually enlisting her teenage piano-playing daughter Bev (Emma Cyr ’19) to help her write a Mounds candy bar jingle to win a national contest. Bev, tired of her mother’s obsessions and more focused on her dream of joining the school’s chamber orchestra, reluctantly agrees to help Lily. But Bev finds herself pulled into a tangled mess of lies and aspirations as Lily becomes obsessed with the impossible dream of winning the jingle contest.

But director Emily Galloway’s ’18 vision goes beyond just a story of family dysfunction. In her director’s note, Galloway focused on the darker themes of the show — themes of domestic abuse and physical violence, anti-Semitism and discrimination, the slow descent into madness and possibly undiagnosed mental illness. Galloway, and the rest of the production, did not shy away from depicting some more upsetting content. When Joe finds out that his wife squandered his paycheck and the money for Bev’s dental care in order to buy enough entries to a contest, he grabs and shakes Kirshbaum, his hands moving dangerously close to her neck. It was shocking and upsetting, but that moment added to the production’s realism. In another scene, Bev’s good friend Imra Jean (Elana Kellner ’19) seems untroubled by the fact that Bev might not be able to attend a dance at the country club because she goes to “Jew church,” while Lily is clearly not thrilled that her daughter’s closest friend is a “WASP.” Kirschbaum, the star of the show, also carefully portrayed a woman who experiences wild highs of joy and excitement as well as deep crashes of exhaustion and depression, successfully treating the fact that Lily may not be mentally stable with humor and thoughtfulness.

Many other details brought the audience into the Green family’s parlor and sitting room. The set, designed by Gabi Scheinthal ’16, was built in such a way that it seemed like there were two distinct rooms, even though the stage physically was not split into two separate entities. The small set pieces, like an old-fashioned radio and phone and a large, unwieldy vacuum cleaner, only added to the sense of realism. Fiona Merullo’s ’16 costuming, although relatively simple, provided context to the time period. Even small details like the Green family wearing regular coats while the wealthy Gert wore a luscious fur coat, added to the overall feel.

However, one of the most impressive parts of the production was the use of sound. Music is a major theme in the show; Bev is trying to become a famous piano player and dreams of attending a conservatory in the East, and the titular contest is to design a musical jingle for a candy bar company. Elena Israel ’18 and Julia Goldberg ’17, the sound designer and executive sound designers respectively, mix period music and radio broadcasting into scenes and set changes in a way that reinforced the wartime setting. Every recording, be it a piano duet that Bev plays for her extended family or the stumbling attempts at writing the jingle or even the buzz of the vacuum cleaner, was perfectly synced to what the actors were doing and felt natural, like something an audience member would hear in his or her own house.

“The Contest” did have a few weak moments. Joe’s actual country of origin is never stated, so Peters’ accent was a bit all over the map. It was also not clear until halfway through the show how old Bev is actually supposed to be. But the show produced a poignant portrayal of family life, ambition and how something as innocent as entering a contest can go so terribly wrong.