Short, not so sweet, with zombies
You can’t throw a book in Iowa City without hitting a writer. With the UI’s renowned writing programs, this isn’t particularly surprising. What may be shocking, however, is when a group of these diverse wordsmiths gather around a common goal (say, writing a one-act play), certain patterns emerge over the years.
“Zombies,” said junior Amanda Kusek, an English and communication-studies major in her third year of playwriting for the Free Association Student Theatre Short Play Festival. “There’s always a play about zombies every year.”
Sam Larsen-Ferree, a senior in English and German, echoes Kusek’s comments.
“There’s always one about zombies, and the Grim Reaper has to appear at some point,” he said. He has coproduced the event for the past two years, and he was a playwright for the two prior.
Morbid themes aside, the festival affords budding authors the opportunity to see their words become plays directed and performed by their peers. Other performances this year include four Shakespearean characters stuck in a car on a road trip and a “coming out” play in which a daughter reveals to her parents her intention of becoming a theater major.
The festival will start at 7 p.m. today at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Admission is free.
The event, in its fifth year, began in Currier as part of the Iowa Writers Living-Learning Community, a University Housing organization offering aspiring freshman scribes a place to live with like-minded individuals. Patrick DeLoach, a UI alumnus with a degree in English, was among the freshmen who got the event off the ground in 2004. Larsen-Ferree refers to the event as DeLoach’s “brainchild.”
“We were one floor under the Performing Arts Community, and it seemed to make sense to try to combine those two floors on a project,” DeLoach wrote via e-mail. “The original show was called ‘Currier Communities Collaboration’ and was performed in the Currier multipurpose room. It was more or less a disaster, but it was fun, and enough people came to justify trying again the next year.”
DeLoach said that in its second year, the group adopted the Free Association Student Theatre moniker and decided to focus more on the individual writing for the plays. 2005 was also the first time the Mill hosted the festival. Larsen-Ferree described the restaurant as the “perfect venue” for the event.
“We don’t know where else we would do it,” he said. “It’s got a laid-back atmosphere where we can sit back with friends and family, eat some food, and watch a few plays. We didn’t want it to get too highbrow.”
The Iowa Writers Living-Learning Community is now located on Stanley’s first two floors, but the first-year students still get first crack at the chance to write for the festival. Among those freshmen is Natalie Terchek, an English major and theater minor who is both writing and directing a play (though she is not directing her own play, which the festival forbids). Thus far, she has found the Writers Community to be a great environment to nurture her talent.
“Because we’re all writers here, we all automatically connect with each other, and there’s a lot of support,” she wrote via e-mail. “I can talk about my writing with my friends back home, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, OK, it’s really good,’ but when I talk about it with my friends in the Community, we can go more in depth and dig into it, because they understand more.”
Terchek said she has been working on her play since November. The writers are encouraged to begin their scripts as early as possible, submitting them to numerous workshops with each other with the goal of having a finished draft by the end of the first semester. During the second semester, the playwrights select directors for their plays from a pool of volunteers (“We make full use of Facebook, like everyone else,” Larsen-Ferree said).
At that point, the play is essentially out of the author’s hands, a “classic theater tradition” that, Larsen-Ferree said, gives the writer a semiprofessional experience — they must “sit back and let the directors run the show.” Although a Short Play Festival veteran such as Kusek chooses not to meet with her director at all, first-year writers are encouraged to collaborate and make suggestions but never contradict the director’s vision.
Open auditions determine who will perform in the productions. Roles are filled by student actors, mostly theater majors, who are looking for an opportunity to gain some coveted onstage experience. The year of work from script to stage results in a series of one-act pieces, each around 10 minutes long, with no more than four or five actors apiece. For the students involved, however, the payoff arrives when they get to finally see all that effort come to fruition during the performance.
“It’s all about giving them the chance to see their work on stage,” Larsen-Ferree said.
That the plays are written, directed, and acted by students entirely outside of the classroom reveals the dedication they have. It’s one of the main reasons DeLoach started the Short Play Festival and why he continues to support the event, zombies and all.
“There are other short play festivals at Iowa, but I don’t believe any of them workshop their own new material ‘in-house,’ ” he said. “We take good plays and make them better. Spending time with new playwrights, discussing their scripts and the craft in general, was the most rewarding part of my entire undergrad life. Also, it’s fun to watch theater in a bar.”
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