Reading Response to Overmyer's "On the Verge"

First of all, if I were asked to design a poster for Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge, or The Geography of Yearning, my initial impulse is to slap a picture of a dictionary on there since that’s what the audience will need to bring with them if they want any hope of understanding what the various characters are saying.

On a more serious note, however, I would show an imaged of the three women scaling the face of a cliff. However, instead of using a rope, I would find a way to photoshop the image to make it look as though the women are using a timeline as a means of scaling the cliff. Cheesy, I know, but it emphasizes the play’s idea of facing the future as though it is an uncharted territory ripe for exploration and discovery. The tagline from the script at the bottom of the poster would be “I am experiencing a definite, a palpable – yearning for the future!”

 Also, one particularly intriguing aspect of the play is the character of Mr. Coffee. He is one of two characters that only Fanny ever interacts with, the other one being the dream figure of Grover, her husband. Mr. Coffee, dressed all in white, does not seem to be from any particular era in history yet he knows Fanny and Grover well enough to inform her of her husband’s death. Judging from the fact that Mr. Coffee says he only had one meeting with Grover and that he says that he will meet Fanny yet again, it is incredibly possible that Mr. Coffee acts as an angel of death in the play. After all, since the women are in fact exploring aspects of the future, part of every person’s future is the inevitable end of one’s life.