Convention Friends

When Dylan Hiester watches “Severance,” sometimes he can hear the voice of its creator, his old friend from Western Dan Erickson.

“I know when Dan has written an episode, because there’s so many weird anachronisms or strange, funny things that he injects into everything,” says Hiester, ’09, B.A., theatre. “There’ll be just a little throwaway line where it’s like, ‘That’s perfect Dan.’ He has such an interesting, cool mind.”

As a student, Hiester got to live in that mind for a few weeks when he performed in “Convention,” a play written by Erickson and staged by WWU’s Student Theatre Productions (STP) in the Old Main Theatre.

Set in dystopian office cubicles whose workers have no memory of ever leaving, “Convention” is where Erickson, ’07, B.A., English – creative writing, began noodling on the themes he explores in “Severance,” the critically acclaimed Apple TV+ series that just completed its second season.

“I think ‘Convention’ was this small idea that Dan had and then over the last decade and a half, it just expanded,” Hiester says.

“Convention” takes place inside a mysterious company that apparently makes packing peanuts. Hiester says the four co-workers are kept on task by the disembodied voice of their supervisor, whose corporate-speak is “overwhelmingly menacing in the most faux-jovial way.”

Hiester sees other “nuggets” of “Convention” characters that made their way into “Severance,” like the play’s rule-obsessed Cyrus, class clown Dutch, and straight-men Brad and Hiester's character Andy.

When WWU’s student-funded STP theatre company selected Erickson’s “Convention” to put up in the Old Main Theatre, the group asked Abe Manion, ’07, theatre, to help direct the play.

“All the students wanted to be involved,” Manion remembers. “There was just kind of a buzz about it. It was a completely original full-length play Dan had written in one of our writing classes.”

Manion says Erickson was a first-time director and did most of the work. “But it was fun to be there to chime in with an idea,” he says. “I was just there as a second brain to bounce ideas off of.”

Like many theatre grads of that era, Manion and Hiester have been keeping track of Erickson’s career and knew that “Severance” was coming.

“It’s just so cool that it turned into such a phenomenon,” Manion says.

WWU theatre students mounted the show again, with former faculty member Patrick Dizney as director, to take it to the 2008 regional Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in Wyoming. Hiester performed as Andy in that production, too, and received an acting award at the festival.

But at least one “Severance” fan, a “West Coast theatre kid” who attended the festival that year, took to TikTok to ask if anyone else remembers that weird play from Western about office workers that “feels exactly like ‘Severance.’ ”

Hiester says one of the most memorable parts of “Convention” were the props and costuming. One of his co-stars shaved the top of his head each day for his middle-aged character’s combover, Hiester says. And a demonic minotaur costume made out of a giant cow’s skull, complete with glowing red eyes and steam, “was truly one of the coolest costume pieces I’ve ever seen,” he says.

His favorite bit of stagecraft on “Convention” was figuring out how his character would cut into his own head and pull out a packing peanut. Right there on stage.

“I put fake skin on my forehead so I could stick a letter opener under it, and it would peel the skin up a little bit — really gross!” he says. “Then I would palm a blood packet and blood would leak out, and then I’d grab a packing peanut out of it, like, ‘Look! There was a packing peanut in my head!’”

So when “Severance” viewers watched a character have a hole drilled in their skull in hopes of reuniting their innie and outie consciousnesses, Hiester wasn’t surprised. He wonders if “Convention” holds even more clues to the next closely guarded plot twists in “Severance.”

“I tell all my friends, ‘There’s going to be a minotaur. I’m telling you, there’s going to be a minotaur.’”