Oberlin theater seems to be devoting an unusual amount of time lately to taking jabs at pretentious artists. This past spring, the Oberlin Gilbert and Sullivan Players staged Patience, William Gilbert’s satire of the aesthetic movement typified by Oscar Wilde. This weekend, the original musical HellaDeck will be setting its sights on pretentious hipsters. And this past weekend, the Oberlin Student Theater Association presented Virginia Woolf’s skewering of British poets, philosophers, and artists, Freshwater.

Virginia Woolf’s only play, Freshwater was written as an affectionate jab at her great aunt, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Also appearing in the play are Cameron’s husband, the India-fixated philosopher Charles Hay Cameron, poet Alfred Tennyson and pre-Raphaelite artist George Frederick Watts. They cohabit a seaside estate with their maid Mary and Watts’ wife Ellen Terry. The latter is clearly not comfortable in the isolated company of her husband and his pretentious friends and ultimately elopes with the straight-laced naval lieutenant John Craig, despite his insistence that he is “not the sort of man who does things in a hurry.”

Freshwater was written by Woolf to be performed by herself and a circle of friends, meaning that there is the danger of the play coming off as one gigantic inside joke. Director Julia Goldstein attempted to remedy this by presenting the play in a spirit of “organic creativity, spontaneity and artistic collaboration”; for the most part, she succeeded.

Her cast did an admirable job of bringing the somewhat obtuse comedy to life. However, though their sense of comic timing was uniformly impeccable, the actors never seemed to fully immerse themselves in their characters. Perhaps it was the decision to use American rather than British accents, or perhaps it was merely an issue of the actors’ age, but with the exception of Andrew Broaddus’ spot-on portrayal of the self-centered Lord Tennyson, one never quite forgot that one was watching a group of 21st century college students on stage rather than a cadre of early “belle époque” British eccentrics.As a result, scenes originally written as biting satire of both artistic pretension and British society in general often came off simply as absurdist humor. The courtship of Craig and Ellen, for example, instead of coming off as a dialogue between two genuine neurotics, one isolated from traditional society, the other constrained by it, became simply a somewhat quirky love scene in the hands of Emily Dodd and Brian Piper.

Wilder Main’s abysmal acoustics and drab ambiance tend to suck the life out of many otherwise excellent productions, but the cast and crew did an admirable job of coping with the auditorium’s, to say the least, non-ideal conditions. Set designer Diana Reasonover did an especially impressive job of actually using the visual aspects of the auditorium to the show’s advantage; she cleverly incorporated the auditorium’s fireplace into a representation of a British drawing room rather than simply building around it, as most productions condemned to performing in Wilder do.