To ease the pain of the recent cancellation of Hum Play, the directors inaugurate the Toga Tree, newfound rival of the Naked Tree. Photo taken by Kiana Poorfard.
In a tragic and unexpected turn of events, Hum Play Direktors Alex Moses and Eira Nylander came forward at last week’s Senate meeting, pale-faced and shaking, to announce that, “for reasons we can’t and do not want to go into,” they have been forced to cancel this year’s Hum Play, which had formerly been scheduled to have its sub-free performance on April 20 and its official performance on April 22.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” said Moses. “There were a lot of factors to take into account. But at the end of the day, we decided that it would be a positive decision for the mental and physical well-being of ourselves and our cast to call the whole thing off. We just…we just couldn’t hold them off any longer. Their beady little eyes… It was just—it was too much.”
Aside from a couple of strange digressions—Nylander wringing her hands and muttering about high incidences of rabies, Moses repeatedly saying “they literally EAT GARBAGE”—both were extremely cryptic about the true motivations behind their decision.
“I look forward to Hum Play all year every year, and I think I deserve an explanation as to why this really happened,” said Hum Play 2015 director August Staubus. “Personally—and this is strictly off the record—I think it’s the raccoons.” When pressed further about this curious claim, Staubus declined to comment.
Quest investigative journalists, however, took this lead and followed it as far as time allowed. This Wednesday, April 13, one journalist, arriving on the scene at Vollum lecture hall just minutes before Hum 110 lecture, encountered a frenzied Paul Hovda wildly brandishing a broom at the front of the hall, shouting “Come out! I know you’re hiding in here somewhere, you fucking ring-tailed bastards!”
In reply to this, a distant chittering came from somewhere deep in the bowels of the lecture hall.
“It all started this Canyon Day,” explained Hovda in a interview later that evening. “I guess all the boots tromping around on the paths over there disturbed a…nest…or something. My educated theory as a logician and avowed raccoon enthusiast is that this prompted a mass raccoon migration into this very lecture hall. You can’t see them right now, but if you sit here for long enough, you can hear them in the walls, skittering, scrabbling.”
In an effort to discover for certain whether the raccoon infestation was indeed the cause of Hum Play’s cancellation, an anonymous informant on the Hum Play cast offered some glimpses into the tumultuous progression of events during their nightly rehearsals.
“At first, it wasn’t such a big deal. They kept to themselves,” explained the cast member. “But then, they started getting bolder and bolder. The other day, a few of them banded together and carried away our Apollo. It got to the point where we were all worried for our safety. Not to mention they absolutely reek.”
The raccoons, at press time, declined to comment.