On Friday, March 13 and Saturday, March 14, the Elizabethtown College Theatre and Dance Division of the Fine and Performing Arts Department hosted its fourth annual “Etown New Playwrights Fest” in Zug Recital Hall.
The fest features students that have taken Associate Professor of English Dr. John Rohrkemper’s playwriting course. The plays are presented in a “staged reading format” and range from 10 to 30 minutes.
Staged readings are a process that all plays go through in the development stage. “Staged readings allow the director, performers and audience all to focus on the text … and not to be overwhelmed by scenery, costumes, lighting, blocking or direction,” a note in the fest’s program from Associate Professor of Theatre and Director of Theatre and Dance Michael Swanson reads. The idea behind staged readings are that playwrights can get feedback on the dialogue of their play without it being drowned out by all of the visual enhancements of a live performance.
“In [Theatre] 240, students read and analyze many short plays, perform writing exercises and write two formal plays, one ten-minute play and one one-act play,” Rohrkemper said. “A play script is never meant to be the finished product, so it’s scary but important for playwrights to see their plays on stage, to see how they work as theater pieces.” With the combination of the course as well as the fest, students are able to see how far their skills have come.
“Since it was my first play, [it was] very stressful,” Kierra Swisher, a sophomore theatre major, said. “It takes a lot of work. Since I already had my story written, I just needed to turn it into a play,” she said. “So, you have to work on character sketches, your setting and plot. But while working on everything separately, you need to keep all of the other details in mind. Then if you come up with a brilliant idea in the middle of your play, you want to add it in, and to do that, you need to move everything around.”
Swisher’s play is titled “Bella Fuga (Beautiful Escape)” and focuses on a high school girl who is forced to make her next life decision on her own. “The topic [is] more of an ‘only you know what’s right for you’ kind of thing,” Swisher said.
“If I were not academically involved in the program,” Jade Brooks-Bartlett, a junior theatre major, said, “I think I would have found it much more stressful than I did because it is very time and energy consuming.” She also acknowledged the challenges. “…there was still a lot I drew out of myself,” she said. “Some monologues are based around true events. . .so keeping kind of true to those things was something I wanted to do. Coming up with the topic, actually, was not that hard. It was the actual writing that was harder.”
Brooks-Bartlett’s play is “The Dead Guy.” “The play that I wrote is a comedy,” Brooks-Bartlett said. The play is about a college student who moves into an apartment to find it haunted by a 22-year-old ghost who died five years ago. “You never really see modern ghosts in entertainment. They’re all hundreds of years old and relatively not relatable,” she said. “I literally asked myself, ‘what if it was a dude that died recently?’ and the play sprung from that.”
These playwrights hope to continue to hone their skills and put together plays that their audience will enjoy, going through the process of playwriting again and again.
