Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
The New Play Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary Thursday, Feb. 21 to Sunday, Feb. 24 with three staged readings and three play workshops. Written by Occidental students and directed in collaboration with theater professor Laural Meade, the festival also includes professional directors and actors from the community.
In addition to giving student playwrights the chance to work with theater professionals, the festival gave audience members the unique opportunity to see the playwriting process in action. This included a “talk back” question-and-answer session after each performance, in which the audience could participate and potentially contribute to the editing process by asking the playwrights, directors and actors questions.
The staged reading was a strange scene, as the actors have to adjust to the odd obstacle of holding the script at all times. This is one of the many parts of the playwriting process and can be as casual as “friends reading the play in your living room” or as formal as “high-end professional” readings used to audition a show for a theater, Meade said.
First in the line-up, Grayson DeJesus’s (senior) No Heroes featured a modification of the traditional reading format. DeJesus, in collaboration with guest director Joe Fria, modified the staged reading format to include blocking.
“I didn’t want a row of music stands,” DeJesus said during the question-and-answer session. He and Fria were also selective about which stage directions were read and delegated them to all of the actors.
Traditional reading style was returned to on Sunday, however, in Conor Anderson’s (first-year) playwriting debut, Thine Angel Eyes.
Though trained in prose and fiction, Anderson decided to try playwriting after taking Meade’s Cultural Seminar Program course last semester. As a result, the first draft of Thine Angel Eyes was much like a novel in play format, with inspirations stemming from William Blake’s poetry and the horror genre, Anderson said.
Like the other staged readings, the actors got two four-hour sessions last week and one three-hour session the morning of the reading with the latest draft of the play.
Director Corey Madden said Anderson didn’t know how to write for his actors at first.
“But they asked him questions like ‘What’s her motivation?’, and he started to write with those questions in mind,” Madden said.
In addition to the staged reading of Karen Baughn’s (senior) Chaplin’s, workshops of The Thing About Midnight by Molly Mermelstein (senior), Side-Swiped by Cassidy North-Reist (junior) and Powerhouse by Hannah McDowell (senior) took place throughout the festival. Unlike the readings, the workshops utilized only costumes and props-no scripts. Participating actors were Occidental students as well as professionals.
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