“The Guiding Spirit” is Beloit’s fall 2025 theater production from the Performing Arts Department (PART). It’s a student-written piece based on the mysterious death of Beloit College Professor Teddy Wright in 1926. I attended the Nov. 14 performance with the hopes of answering a simple question: is the play any good?
To begin with, attending this play cost me a whopping zero dollars and zero cents, which absolutely earns it some brownie points. I love free things, and the only thing I would have rather had than a free ticket to a play is a big rainbow Slinky. (This is only because Slinkies last longer than two hours.)
Format-wise, it’s fairly unusual. The play centers on a group of students at Beloit who are making a play about Wright’s death in their Documentary Theatre class. It jumps between scenes of them as various figures from Beloit Christmas Past and scenes where they’re playing the students writing and performing those scenes. As Matt (Charlie Harrison’28) puts it in the play, “That’s so meta.”
I do think the play’s format works, but it’s definitely an adjustment. Different scenes were written by different students, and that shows in its structure. For one thing, it doesn’t really have a plot. I mean, it does, but it’s not like there’s a central conflict that drives the story. It’s more of a persistent unravelling — less solving the mystery and more gaining a fuller picture of it. It’s a little like going through an animatronic dark ride at Disney World: one-off scenes that flesh out a world more than they build any singular narrative.
It would probably be stronger as a story if it did just a little bit more to focus on the individual students. They have a couple monologues, but besides that they can feel a little glossed over just because there’s so many of them, with each of them trying to share the limelight equally. And their time is split with the characters they’re playing, too; their performances as these other characters don’t really develop them.
The props are pretty limited, but “Guiding Spirit” does a good job using what they have to tell a compelling story. There’s a couple good gags that use the lack of props to their advantage, too (Ercole, you make a wonderful statue).
Speaking of which, the jokes are where this play really shines. It’s funny and the comedy doesn’t come off as forced. That is partly thanks to the writing, but I think it’s really down to the acting. Some of the jokes could definitely swing either way, but the delivery is natural enough that they feel spontaneous and not like they’re trying to force a laugh out of the audience.
I’m glad they made it funny, because jokes are definitely the thing that this structural setup — episodic scenes with a rotating cast — lends itself to the most. The comedy gives it a lot of direction, and I think removing the jokes would get you a play that’s not only way more boring, but also feels a little aimless. The jokes do a lot of lifting here to make the show an engaging watch.
The other thing I think this play (mostly) manages is not being too on the nose. I could see it being very hard to avoid being too self-referential with the literal college you are at right now as your setting. It is still fairly steeped in the Beloit ethos, but besides a couple off-hand bits of dialogue, I don’t think it would be particularly confusing to a newcomer. Which is good; ideally, you probably don’t want to be assuming that the audience is part of a hyperspecific in-group with prior knowledge. Writing from that place can make something feel like it was designed just to reaffirm a self-ingratiating sense of college pride, and that’s something that “Guiding Spirit” avoids.
Lastly, there’s the choreography. The cast did a great job with the on-stage action. Things felt coordinated and together, but still fluid and natural. There wasn’t always a ton of movement, especially with some of the classroom scenes, but when there was it was well-executed, and things weren’t usually still for so long that they started to feel stagnant.
So — my verdict? Go see it! If you’re reading this before Nov. 20, there’s still three showings you can attend. And the tickets are free if you’re a student. It’s by no means a perfect play, but it’s entertaining and absolutely worth your time.
Featured image: Quinn Annis
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