By Madison Brown | Staff Writer“Variety is the spice of life,” is a quote from "Fanny’s Fantastic Food Frolic", a fall production from the Augusta University Department of Communication.Written by Dr. Melanie Kitchens O’Meara and Dr. Ruth Laurion Bowman, the play shares the message of choosing to live a colorful life, rather than one that is dull and gray.The play focuses on a young girl named Fanny, played by freshman Madison Hall, who has let her whole life become a dull shade of what the other actors called, “blah gray.” Fanny’s mom, played by freshman Ellie Mansfield, tries to show her daughter how to have a more colorfully diverse life by following Sophie Calle’s photographic journal, "The Chromatic Diet." A group of performing dancers, known as the Bauhaus Grays and inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stage theatre workshops, helped Fanny on her journey to create a more diverse life for herself.Each day was assigned a different color, as Sophie Calle did in her photographic journal. Monday was orange, Tuesday was red, Wednesday was white, Thursday was green, Friday was yellow, Saturday was originally gray, and Sunday was a day where all the colors came together at once.Fanny could be seen growing more and more interested in the project during each day. On Monday, she didn’t participate at all, but by Saturday, Fanny had chosen to reinvent the color gray and make it as interesting as all the other colors had been.Fanny’s Fantastic Food Frolic is a play that can be difficult, but not impossible, to muddle through. Many complex ideas and concepts feel almost like they are something only someone well-versed in theatre can understand. However, the actors do a good job of combating this, through the repeated quip of, “Google it!” that was followed by an actor pulling out a cardboard “iPhone” to explain those things to the audience. That was a fun, creative way to explain things that the average theater-goer probably wouldn’t understand right away.Ironic cohesiveness throughout each scene helped give the play an amusing, yet dream-like feel. Each performer in the Bauhaus Grays within a scene performed apart at the same time as another part to create the whole scene. If the parts had been performed separately, the scene would have felt choppy. The simultaneous parts of each scene gave the play a sense of cohesiveness where there would normally be chaos. A perfect example of this can be seen in the red scene on Tuesday. Each member had a different interpretive dance that they did that, when all put together at once, gave Fanny the confidence that she needed to create her own dance.The Saturday scene, where Fanny is tasked with making her own meal, had the most significant impact. Fanny decides to forgo the pink food that Calle had eaten on Saturday and eat something gray instead. That is where the audience really starts to see that Fanny has evolved from her old “blah gray” self into a new and colorful person. Instead of just eating something “blah” gray, Fanny chooses to make gumbo and lets each of the Bauhaus Grays assign her with an ingredient to find for her gumbo. The ingredients, in this case, were dances that Fanny improvised.Each Bauhaus Gray member did the dance that Fanny made up for them, making the entire scene similar and different at the same time. Through the dances and Mom’s monologue of the different shades of gray, we see that Fanny had truly become more diverse than she was when she began the chromatic diet. Instead of the same old shade of “blah” gray, now Fanny sees “smoky, stormy, snowy, and alabaster” gray.I greatly enjoyed the play as an abstract piece of art that didn’t lay out all the facts and answers in front of the audience. It was the audience’s job to find the meaning of the play for themselves.Contact Madison Brown at madbrown@augusta.edu