An Accidental Success: The Reed Hum 110 Play

If memory serves me correctly, in about a month at Reed College they will perform a play.  I'm not sure what the title of the play will be, but it's a parody of Hum 1110, the humanities course all Freshmen at Reed have to take.  The plot is that a freshman who has not studied during the first year prays for help for her (usually her) final exam, and the gods send down Homer to help guide her through the material she has meticulously avoided learning.  What follows is a loose romp, a mixture of nerdy witticisms,  dirty gags, cameos from the professors and staff who don't have the good sense to stay away, and Reedie in-jokes that are hilarious to the student body but probably loses context the nanosecond a student steps off campus.

The annual performance of this play is, by all accounts, one of the pivotal events of the Reed student calendar, with huge lines forming to wait to pack into the auditorium for it's one-time only performance.  Far more people attend this play than ever attend any Hum lecture.  It's easy for a current student to think that it's the type of tradition that has been happening at Reed forever.

It hasn't, though, unless you define "forever" as "since 1994", when I wrote and directed the first one. Actually, for a current Reedie, that probably qualifies as "forever".  Sigh.

I wrote a play called The Extremely Abridged Hum 110 during my Sophomore year at Reed, cast 10 or so of my friends and put it on in a ramshackle fashion in the spring of that year for Reed Arts Weekend.  Held in the Vollum lecture hall, the same room in which the Hum lectures are held, it was attended by less than 100 people on a Sunday afternoon if I remember correctly, a number that doesn't seem impressive given that current editions are said to completely fill the 409 seat lecture hall, but seemed pretty darn spiffy to me at the time.

The people who saw it liked it a lot, and it was suggested to me that we should do it again next year.  I enlisted my friend Francisco Toro, a freshman at the time, to do it during his Sophomore year.  The next year we conscripted Tom Strong to do it during his Sophomore year.  And after I graduated, they got two more people to do it during their Sophomore year.  And that was that.  It outlived me, and it kept going, each year adding and revising for each new year while keeping the core idea intact.  Apparently there was a point at the end of the nineties when it wasn't doing very well, but it seems that it was revived and even improved. 

When I had met Nick Blake, a Reed graduate from the early oughts, in Boston and we discovered that we both had done the Humplay (somewhere along the way the term Hum 110 Play got shortened to Humplay), we held a screening of our versions of the play and I was amazed at how the event matured.  Both in attendance but also production.  It really looked meticulously planned and well put-together, and apparently giant puppets are now sometimes involved.  It no longer seemed to be the work of one person or a few people just putting stuff together but the work of a team with a lot of resources, varying talents, a sense of organizational memory, and a deep playbook.  And I couldn't be happier about that.

It's now been 14 years since I've last seen a Hum 110 Play (I still use the outdated label), but every spring I wonder how it's going and what'd it'd be like to see it these days.  I think there might be things from the first versions that have survived to this day.  Maybe one of these years I'll make the trip and try to see it, if there's space in Vollum.

Link: Humplay article from the Reed Alumni Magazine