Starting this weekend, students can partake in the generally-exclusive experience of viewing a collection of brand-new theater works. Attendance of the 2008 Theater New Works Productions and Musical Theater Workshop presents audiences with 10 novel student-produced plays and musicals.
Entitled Buffet of Fear, the 2008 New Works Productions features readings of six original student plays taking place this Thursday through Saturday. The festival is an established annual event meant to promote innovative theater activity.
"Each year [the Department of Theater Studies] has a New Works festival because part of our mission is to be involved with the creation of new work in theater," said Miriam Sauls, the department's director of theater and communications.
The pieces are the culmination of the course Theater Studies 182: New Works in Progress Workshop, which was thematically centered on an analysis of fear. The study of terror played a seminal role in the production of the works, which are all variations on horror plays.
"A lot of the discussions grew from the question of 'What is the nature of fear?'" said sophomore Stephanie Bazell, whose play will be debuting in the festival. "We created different fear pieces-different things that we personally were afraid of, which varied from sharks to cockroaches to murder. So the process was sort of a discovery of fear, but the actual plays are basically horror, or takes on horror plays."
In fact, the majority of the plays featured in the event tend to be humorous interpretations of their spookier counterparts.
"We've been cracking up rehearsing," said senior Sean Murnane, another student whose work will be showcased this weekend. "A lot of the stuff turned out to be a lot more funny than scary,"
This year, the festival breaks with precedent by expanding to include the work of a professional writer. On Sunday, two established actors will team up with students to perform in a reading of playwright Megan Mastyn-Brown's new piece, Going After Alice. Mastyn-Brown is a member of the acclaimed LAByrinth Theater Company, which was started by the famed actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz. Because the reading is more informal, its emphasis is on Mastyn-Brown's script itself, which tells the tale of a married couple's grief after they lose their son in the Iraq war.
"[The actors] will be very familiar with the text, but we won't have furniture and props, and people will be holding scripts," said professor Jody McAuliffe, who is directing the reading. "The focus is on the material. It's not on production-the idea is that you can really hear the play."
Fans of musical theater can likewise have the chance to see the first-ever performance of original musicals in next Tuesday's musical theater workshop. Professor John Clum, chair of the theater studies department, said in an e-mail that the experiences of attending each event are essentially "no different, except that one [of the productions] is all musicals."
The musicals are the ultimate product of two separate Theater Studies classes: one in which students write the musicals and accompanying music, and the other where students perform their classmates' finished pieces. Similar to the dramatic works, the musicals have a primarily playful tone. For example, titles of the works include the humorously ironic Polygamy: The Musical and The Bible: In 20 Minutes or Less. The latter promises to live up to its name's entertainment potential, boasting the subversively comic highlights of unionized angels and a Noah's Ark scene complete with music straight out of The Lion King's "Circle of Life" sequence.
The classes are open to students of all levels, so having already produced several of your own musicals is not a must.
"I would say the levels of musical ability ran the gamut from having taken a few music classes to having written musicals before," said Andrew Bentz, a first-year graduate student who helped produce and also performs in The Bible.
Individual performances aside, the two new works events are most remarkable in their rare support of student-produced pieces.
"The class itself has been a really good experience because you probably are not going to have the opportunity to write a musical and then to have it performed unless you are a professional," said sophomore Kristin Sourbeer, who wrote the lyrics for The Bible. "But as far as being a college student and having it performed, it's hard-so this experience has been really cool."
The 2008 New Works Theater Productions will be held April 17-19 at Brody Theater on East Campus and the Musical Theater Workshop will be held Tues. April 22 at 8 p.m. in Sheafer Theater. The reading of Going After Alice will be performed Sunday, April 20 at 2 p.m. in the Sheafer Theater.
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