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First
Annual Spring One-Act Play Fest
Abbie Chase ’10 (left) and Janessa Kowal ’08 in a scene
from Ephemera by
Darren Harned. (Photo by Jon Crispin.) |
The Department of Theatre
will begin a new tradition this spring: its first annual
fully produced Festival of One-Act Plays. This year’s
festival will run Thursday through Saturday, April 17-19,
and Wednesday through Saturday, April 23-26, at 8 p.m.
each night in Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center.
“This festival will give more of our extremely talented
students the opportunity to direct a play as well have their
scripts produced on the stage,” said Kiki Gounaridou,
associate professor of theatre and chair of the department
The festival will feature three plays by students. The plays
address social and personal themes through vividly drawn
characters and situations.
Winter Requiem by
Rachel Lerner-Ley ’08,
directed by Erica Cormier ’08, follows the employees
of a small New England inn as they prepare to celebrate its
25th anniversary season and face yet another winter without
snow. By the end of the play, the world of the inn will be
changed and perhaps even gone forever. The play explores
the increasingly detrimental impact of global warming, loss,
change, and tradition. Lerner-Ley is a theatre major (Spanish
minor) from Newton, Mass. Her plays have received many awards
and recognitions, including finalist and semi-finalist in
The National Young Playwrights Competition. Winter Requiem received
the 2007 Denis Johnston Playwriting Award and was read at
Smith as part of the 2007 New Playreading Series
Ephemera, a play
by Darren Harned (Hampshire College ’07),
directed by Lisa Wall AC, communicates a sense of fading
Americana and the glorious but ephemeral nature of a life
as it focuses on Meryl, a 70-year-old-woman moving out of
her home after her husband, Clay, dies. As two movers empty
out the contents of her house, she stumbles upon a ghostly
memory of her husband that has been packed away in boxes
for years. Ephemera was accepted into the 32nd annual
Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Original Short Play Festival
and was performed in New York City in June 2007. The play
also took second prize in last spring’s Five College
Denis Johnston Prize competition.
Isosceles, by
Lynne S. Brandon GR, directed by Emily Hiltzik ’09,
offers a fantastical triangle of butch, femme, and macho
contending for the apex of power in a famous Parisian salon.
Gert, Alice, and Pablo maneuver language, cubist art, and
writing as each vies to be at the top. Brandon is an MFA
candidate in Playwriting at Smith. Her monologue Bare Chested was selected for the
Short Attention Span PLAYFEST presented by Atlantis Playmakers
in Lowell, Mass., in July 2006, and the short play She
Doth Protest for the NoHo Playwrights Lab reading in
November 2006.
Festival tickets ($8 general public, $5 students/seniors)
are available by calling 413-585-ARTS or by stopping by the
Mendenhall box office Monday through Friday, 1-4 p.m. and
beginning at 7 p.m. on performance nights.
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