This past weekend, Bucknell’s theater department put on “The One-Act Play That Goes Wrong.”

The play was a murder mystery about the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, an acting group that performed a play called The Muder at Haversham Manor. Basically, it was a play within a play, but the members of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are very accident prone, so everything that can go wrong during the production does go wrong; cues are missed, lines are forgotten, props don’t work, etc… but of course, that’s the point and hilarity ensues.

This inspired some students to write, produce and act in their own version of the play called The One Act Play That Went Horribly Wrong, which was about the Bucknell theater department staging a murder mystery called The Butchered Bison. At the start of the play someone murders Bucky the Bison, and it’s up to the students in the play to find out who did it.

“I was really excited about this project,” student director Axe Sedant said. “I really liked the idea of taking someone else’s idea and pretending I came up with it myself. I actually do this for schoolwork, and it works every time!”

However, some aspects of the original play did not play out as well in Sedant’s version. In an effort to replicate the various “errors” from the original, Sedant purposefully did not allow his actors to rehearse prior to the performance.

“We needed to reach new levels of authenticity,” he said. “So I wanted them to be very underprepared for the play.”

Unfortunately, Sedant was also underprepared as a director and failed to communicate that information to his actors. A student actor named Libra DiCapricorn organized their own rehearsals – Libra played a character named Leonardo DeCapitated, one of the other characters that was murdered.

The level of preparedness was a shock to Sedant. On the show’s opening night, when the actors kept hitting their cues, Sedant was in complete shock backstage; his one-act play was going horribly wrong.

For example, Libra DiCapricorn was supposed to fall on stage during their grand entrance, so Sedant placed a banana peel where they were supposed to stand. However, DiCapricorn carefully stepped around the peel and said their first line, “Now, how doth this bison perish in bloody murder?”

In an outrage, Sedant ran after DeCapricorn, but he ended up slipping on the banana peel and falling off the stage and into the crowd. However, the audience thought that he was doing a stage dive and carefully supported him with their hands all the way to the back of the auditorium.

And that is how “The One Act Play That Went Horribly Wrong” went exactly right.