You may see Charlie Korsmo in the Infinite Corridor this fall when he picks up his life as a junior majoring in physics. But this summer you could have seen him on the big screen in the flick, Can't Hardly Wait. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called him a "standout player ��������������������������� as the smart kid whose science project was a working rain forest and who blossoms from dweeb into rock star on party night." This was Mr. Korsmo's first film in seven years. He appeared in Dick Tracy (1990), Men Don't Leave (1990) and Hook (1991). People magazine (July 20) profiled Mr. Korsmo and his renewed movie career, noting that he got the role through an audition tape made in his MIT dorm room. The hard part, according to the People profile, was "convincing professors to let him take three weeks of structural mechanics by fax from LA. 'They're a bunch of Nobel Prize winners,' said Mr. Korsmo. 'They weren't awed by the movie stuff.'"
Current and former MIT theater folks are strutting the boards in Boston. Alums Christopher Crowley '89 and Monica Gomi '96 are in the Pilgrim Theatre and Ko Theatre Works musical presentation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Or How Not to Do It Again), a play by Jean-Claude van Itallie. Pilgrim co-founder and artistic director Kim Mancuso is a lecturer in the Music and Theater Arts Section; co-founder/actor Kermit Dunkelberg is a former MIT affiliate. Performances are Thursday-Sunday, Aug. 13-29 at 8pm at the Boston Center for the Arts' Cyclorama. Tickets: $15, $10 students/seniors. Info/reservations: 426-0320.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 12, 1998.