>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

So you're 23 years old playing a 67-year-old Albanian immigrant window washer, Salvatore, moments away from dying tragically at the World Trade Center's North Tower.

Being older, everything you do is different. Moving. Talking. Thinking. Sense of humor. The creaks in your joints. The prescriptions in your medicine cabinet. The wife, kids, grandkids — all somewhere downstream in the river called life.

So how does Baker City actor and Eastern Oregon University thespian David Mather

pull it off?

Incredible preparation.

That's right. The fifth-year senior finds an Albanian student who is also a resident assistant at EOU, who helps him master the accent.

"I got to record him speaking," Mather said. "There's a real Slavic sound to it. It sounds a bit like Russian."

Mather also puts his spryness on the back burner and moves slower. He wears lots of makeup, has lots of dark lines to make the appearance of wrinkles. He tells stories and elaborates on everything.

"I look back on all the elderly people in my life, people I've met, people I've seen," he said of his influences.

By this point, he is getting into the Salvatore character.

"Salvatore is very accepting of what's going to happen to him," Mather said. "He understands very quickly that he's not going to make it.

"Portraying a person who is no longer alive gives you motivation to carry on his dreams."

The biggest challenge in "Hole in the Sky," Mather said, is working with a bare set and imagining yourself into a scene.

"It's hard to make yourself be there," he said.

Mather, a music and liberal studies double major with a physics and engineering emphasis, hopes someday to get involved in stage design. In the meantime, he's capitalizing on his opportunity to act in shows that make a difference in people's lives.

Among his major influences is Lynn Burroughs, theater teacher at Baker High School, who inspired him to pursue his dreams.

Mather hopes audiences will be moved as much as he is by the show. They can take away from it a sense of having been there, Mather said, having experienced the tragedy not on TV but in person, never forgetting the victims or the ultimate sacrifice they paid.