This weekend, students and their parents filled up Spingold Theater Center's cozy Merrick Theater for one of the first in a series of senior thesis performances, Helena Raffel's '14 production of [title of show].

As the director, Raffel said in the program, she "has been a huge [title of show] fan for years," and even as she walked around the theater greeting audience members before the show began, it was easy to tell that she was excited to see one of her final projects as an undergraduate come to life.

[title of show] is not, in fact, a typo, but it is a one-act meta-musical of sorts-that is, a musical about a group of friends who are writing an original musical-and the play was adapted by Jeff Bowen in the early 2000s based on a book by Hunter Bell. The show is very much a story about friends; even its two main characters, Jeff and Hunter, garner their namesakes from Bowen and Bell.

The hour-and-a-half long production was quite minimalistic: it was performed by four actors dressed casually in their own clothing. In addition, the nearly continuous score was played soley by a keyboardist and the only props used were a couple of chairs, laptops, cellphones and food items. Long-time friends Hunter (Charlie Madison '15) and Jeff (Brian Haungs '15) open the show with a phone conversation about their dull daily lives in New York.

Jeff is thoroughly bored, watching movies on his laptop while he talks to Hunter, who is working on building a website on his laptop. The two decide to chase their dreams and write an original musical to enter into a theater festival just three weeks away. Here they first experience waves of self-doubt and hesitancy about their work and ideas, and as Hunter says, "just start-starting is the hardest part," he really nails one of the larger themes of the show.

As their writing forms into a meager musical, Jeff and Hunter call upon the help of their friends Susan (Sarah Hines '15) and Heidi, (Sarah Brodsky '15) to act in the finished work. Both women have backgrounds in theater. Susan has long left it for the financial security of a dissatisfying day job and Heidi is still pursuing a performer's life, but struggles through unfulfilling minor and understudy Broadway roles. [title of show] quickly finds its characters helping each other through the sways of self-doubt and only ends when the audience is convinced that the characters have each built up substantial self-belief.

One of the funnier scenes came during an episode of Jeff's writer's block, as he wrote a scene into their musical that found all four characters in a dream sequence. In the scene, the characters are playful, happy and confident, and, being aware that they have been written into Jeff's dream scene, act beyond the laws of physics that bind humans in real life. "Where should we fly to?" asks Jeff, and Hunter wittily replies "how about around the preposition at the end of your sentence."

[title of show] was not all comedy, however, and as the characters' musical finally makes it big toward the end the show, they share a more dramatic number. In this scene, Jeff and Hunter receive phone calls about things that their mentors and patrons want them to change about their show. All four characters launch into an almost eerie chant, repeating "change it, don't change it, change it, don't change it, change it, don't change it, don't change a thing" over and over again.

Through scenes of great emotional variety-from comedy to strife-the actors adjusted their behavior and their characters' interpersonal dynamics accordingly. Hines and Brodsky played off of each other expertly, and both provoked and highlighted the personalities that Haungs and Madison inject into their characters. Through all these movements, the story seems to come full circle, and finally finds the characters content in their creative lives.

In one of the final scenes, Jeff reassures Hunter about their musical, and gives the audience a sense of closure and hope: "This started out as fun with friends and it turned into this whole huge thing. I want it to be this thing. I want it to be everything."