By Ryan Paul
Recently, I taught a class on Walt Disney here at Southern Utah University. As part of their final project, the students had to design an E-ticket ride. The E-ticket was pioneered in the late-1950’s at Disneyland and featured the most exciting and thrilling rides at the park; think Matterhorn Bobsleds. The term now refers to any ride that has high-thrills or provides an exciting immersive experience. This season, the Utah Shakespeare Festival has its E-ticket play, the one that grabs the audience and brings them along for the ride – See How They Run.
There is a special kind of Festival magic that happens when panic, propriety, and perfectly timed chaos collide. Teacups shake. Trousers rip. Doors slam with startling frequency. One person hides while another blasts through the wrong door entirely convinced they are about to be arrested. Somewhere during the mayhem, laughter begins and continues on, and on, and on, and on.
Set in the picturesque English countryside during World War II, See How They Run begins innocently enough. Penelope Toop, a former actress now married to a vicar, decides to spend an evening out with an old friend—an American actor and former colleague stationed nearby with the military. The harmless outing quickly spirals into a catastrophe involving mistaken identities, missing clergy, suspicious behavior, escaped prisoners, spies, and far more men dressed as vicars than any village should reasonably contain.
In See How They Run, vicars are mistaken for spies, respectable citizens behave outrageously, and authority figures prove hilariously incapable of understanding what is happening right in front of them. You, the audience, become co-conspirators in this madness. And of course, there is something wonderfully satisfying about watching respectable people completely lose control, especially if it is happening to someone else.
See How They Run is like watching theatrical dominos falling in a beautifully complex pattern. This sleepy English village, at the outset appears orderly, polite, structured, and restrained. Under that idyllic exterior, however, is a pressure cooker of romantic frustrations, wartime anxieties, and restrictive and binding British social expectations, all ready to explode.
These simmering tensions produce the explosion of comedy in the play. The comedy comes not simply from witty dialogue, but from mounting pressure. Every lie requires another lie. Every attempt to fix a misunderstanding creates three new misunderstandings. Every effort to maintain dignity collapses spectacularly under the weight of circumstance, and you get the exhilarating experience to watch this comedic catastrophe get built brick by brick, cobblestone by cobblestone.
However, See How They Run is more than just a series of comic mishaps and misadventures. It really is a celebration of the imperfect nature of humanity. These characters stumble, panic, overreact, and misunderstand one another constantly, yet their flaws make them deeply lovable. You will recognize something familiar in their frantic attempts to maintain control over uncontrollable circumstances. After all, how many of us have tried to explain something only to make it worse, have watched a small misunderstanding turn into a large-scale problem? I certainly have participated in my share of those experiences––just ask my wife.
For the Festival, this play gives us an opportunity to lean into something that has become one of our greatest strengths: ensemble comedy. Whether performing Shakespearean comedies, classic musical theatre, or contemporary works, USF artists have cultivated the ability to build rhythm with our audiences. Our actors know when to let silence linger and when to accelerate into delightful mayhem. They know how to turn a raised eyebrow or a perfectly timed double take into a laugh that can be explosive and in See How They Run, those skills are on full display.
The person chosen to master this chaos is Geoffrey Kent. This season, aside from directing See How They Run and serving as its Fight Director, he also will be the Fight Director for Troilus and Cressida, which is being performed in the Englestad Theatre. In 2023, Kent directed the Festival’s wildly popular production of The Play That Goes Wrong and most recently acted and served as Fight Director for all three of our 2025 seasons’ Shakespeare productions. Aside from working with the Festival as both an Artistic and Acting company member for numerous seasons, he also spent fourteen seasons with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, twenty-five with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, three with Orlando Shakespeare Theater, and has worked for many other arts organizations as well.
According to Kent, “See How They Run builds to an incredible final act with an epic laugh per minute finale. It is a perfect comic fit for the Randall Theatre and Festival audiences, especially with our cast, chock full of clowns with heart that will keep the show brisk, bright, and laugh out loud funny.”
A truly successful comedy at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, one that you have witnessed live and experienced in a visceral way, can send you out into the Cedar City night lighter and freer than when you arrived. It can restore you and reconnect you as you share the experience with your fellow audience members, united by laughter, surprise, and the unpredictable beauty of live performance.
Once the performance begins, my one piece of advice, which, by the way, I would give to any holder of an E-ticket is: Hang on tight and enjoy the ride.
