Category: Current Students

Spotlight On: Skye Robinson Hillis (OU MFA ’21)

April 13, 2021
by Erik Ramsey
· Chicago · Current Students · Events · Festival · News · Productions · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

As we begin the 27th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival, we’ll be giving the spotlight to our third-year MFA playwrights. Third-year writers graduate soon after their thesis productions headline the festival.

by Steven Strafford

Skye Robinson Hillis is good with words. Whether it be in her plays, or a well-crafted joke over Zoom chat or text message, she knows how to string the words together for great effect. (Often making the writer of this article laugh out loud. And a personal side note: Skye was extremely helpful to me in my adjusting to life in Athens. She always made time for my questions. I am grateful for the care she showed for me. I will miss her jokes and insightful help on my work.)

Skye’s play, The Martha Mitchell Effect is one of our two featured productions this year.

We thought it might be fun to let Skye, in her own words, answer a few questions in interview format for her spotlight piece.

Here is that interview:

Where are you from? What parts of “home” show up in your writing?

Born and raised outside Boston, but also partially raised in southeastern Pennsylvania, and after moving there in 2008 for school, I now consider Chicago home. Basically zero parts of home show up in my writing because I usually prefer to write outside my own personal experience.

What first made you want to write plays?

Dialogue. I tried to be a screenwriting major for a while in undergrad until I learned that nobody cares what your characters have to say in film, only what they do and how it looks.

What is it you hope people leave the theater thinking about with your work and/or specifically this play?

Who are your inspirations? Playwrights? Other writers?

Noel Coward, Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman, Pinter, Tracy Letts, Sarah Ruhl.

What’s a favorite theatrical moment for you as an audience member? A moment that stays with you?

All of the Goodman’s Camino Real directed by Calixto Bieto.

What was the inspiration for your featured play this year?

About two years ago I was listening to the Slow Burn podcast, the first season of which is about Watergate, which is where I learned about Martha Mitchell. I’ve been low-key obsessed with the notion of gaslighting for years and especially the gaslighting of woman of note, so from that point on I couldn’t stop thinking about her. This led to a women of Watergate rabbit hole that I still have not climbed out of.

Skye’s bio:

Skye Robinson Hillis (she/her) is a playwright/director/teacher/dramaturg based in Chicago. A two time semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award, her work has been seen at the Kennedy Center’s ACTF, Creede Repertory, The Route 66 Theatre Company, Chicago Dramatists, A Red Orchid Theatre, Piven Theatre Workshop, Artistic Home, Columbia College, and the City of Chicago’s In the Works Play Lab at the Pritzker Pavillion in Millenium Park. Her play AND VASTER was awarded a residency at the New Works Lab at Stratford in 2015, winner of the 2015 Ashland New Plays Festival, and winner of the Holland New Voices Award at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in 2017. As a director/dramaturg, she has worked for Hartford Stage, Goodman Theatre, Court Theatre, A Red Orchid, Remy Bumppo, Stage Left, and more. Her other plays include BURY THE REST, ESCAPE VELOCITY, THE ORDINARINESS OF EVERYTHING ELSE, THE RUNNING MATE, INTO PLACE, and SELFISH.

The Martha Mitchell Effect: In his infamous interview with David Frost, Richard Nixon said that “without Martha Mitchell, there would be no Watergate.” And yet the name Martha Mitchell, once ubiquitous, has faded into the background of history. Bringing her story to the forefront, The Martha Mitchell Effect illustrates the world of the courageous women involved in breaking the Watergate scandal and explores their lasting impact on this country today.

Reserve tickets now for this streaming production at The Martha Mitchell Effect website for April 16, 17, 22, 24. And be sure to check out the full slate of new MFA plays streaming during the festival here.

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2nd-Year Playwright Ivan Mosley in Ohio University Graduate Research Series

April 8, 2021
by John Hendel
· Current Students · News

Second-Year playwright Ivan Mosley will present “How to Be Good & Black: The Legacy of the Black Codes” through the Graduate Research Series (GRS) hosted virtually through Ohio University Libraries!

Ivan’s work is being recognized for its rigor, interest, and thoughtful use of library resources. Ivan will be introduced by the Dean of Libraries, Neil Romanosky, and have time to share his process with a live audience with time for questions and discussion.

Ivan’s presentation, “How to Be Good & Black: The Legacy of the Black Codes”, is scheduled on April 16th from 2:00-3:00pm, and can be joined via Teams at the following link: http://bit.ly/GRS_Mosely.

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What I did last summer (2019): Skye Robinson Hillis

September 20, 2019
by Erik Ramsey
· Current Students · News · Productions · Reading

For Skye, the summer of 2019 was spent working as the Box Office Manager at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont, which produces six shows over three months’ time in two venues. The highlight of her summer, however, was workshopping her full-length play Into Place as a part of the Headwaters New Festival at Creede Repertory Theatre in Colorado. Additionally, her play The Ordinariness of Everything was named a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award.

Read any of her short plays and full-lengths here: https://newplayexchange.org/users/1125/skye-robinson-hillis

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Interview with 1st Year MFA Jordan Ramirez Puckett about Her Seabury Reading: A Driving Beat

April 26, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival officially opens tonight! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work. We’ve interviewed the 3rd Year MFA Playwrights, Philana, Cristina, and Natasha on their Featured Thesis Productions, and the 2nd Year MFA Playwrights, Inna, Katherine, and Trip about their Staged Readings. Our interview series concludes today, wrapping up the 1st Year MFA Playwrights, Jean, Liv, and finally: Jordan!

First Year MFA Jordan Ramirez Puckett (pictured below!) was interviewed by Second Year MFA Katherine Varga about her play, A Driving Beat.

Katherine Varga: Your play features characters from Ohio taking a road trip to California. You recently moved from California to Ohio. Were any parts of the play inspired by your own cross-country journeys?

Jordan Ramirez Puckett: Yes, definitely. Part of the reason why my husband and I drove, rather than fly, from California to Ohio is because I knew I wanted to write this road trip play. For me, the most shocking moment on our road-trip was when we were pulled over by the border patrol in Texas. As soon as they let us go, I turned to my husband and said, “That’s going in the play”.

Katherine: Your character Mateo oftentimes speaks in poetry, sometimes in Spanish. Why did you choose to incorporate Spanish poetry into your play, and what was your approach to writing in a different language?

Jordan: I had written all of these rhymes in English before I realized how important it was to show the role that Spanish plays in Mateo’s life throughout the play. Mateo definitely wanted to rhyme in Spanglish, I just needed to figure out how to write them for him. I didn’t want to directly translate what I had written from English to Spanish. I thought about what he would want to express in Spanish, that maybe he couldn’t say in English, and tried to write that.

Katherine: What most scares you about this play?

Jordan: I relate to Mateo so much. He is the embodiment of a part of my personality and being on stage. But at the same time, I am very aware that I am not a brown teenage boy growing up in Athens, Ohio. And there is a lot of fear surrounding that, writing a protagonist who doesn’t look like you. I know that we have been forced to move differently through the world because of how we are perceived and I just hope that I have done him justice.

Katherine: What do you hope audiences will walk away from your play feeling and/or thinking about?

Jordan: I think the play is largely about the assumptions we make about ourselves and others because of our outward appearances. I hope that the audiences take that with them as they move through the world. And I hope the play makes the audience want to call their moms. That’s the barometer by which I judge most of my plays: how many people call a parent/loved one because they saw my play.

Katherine: What’s your favorite line or moment from the current draft?

Jordan: When Diane gets back to the hotel room after her date. I don’t want to say what happens here. But yeah, I might be a little too proud of that immediate brief interaction between her and Mateo. It’s funny and sweet and reminds me of my relationship with my mom.

Katherine: If you could take an epic road trip with anybody, living or dead, who would it be and why?

Jordan: This is such a hard question. On our road trip to Ohio, we listened to the Hamilton soundtrack more than four times, much to my husband’s chagrin. So, I think if Lin-Manuel Miranda were down to duet some of my favorite Hamilton tunes, he would definitely be my pick.

Jordan Ramirez Puckett is a playwright and lighting designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She often writes about being caught between two identities and our intrinsic need for human connection. She received Abingdon Theatre Company’s Christopher Brian Wolk Award for her play, Restore. Her other plays include Las Pajaritas (2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist), Inevitable (production at San Francisco Playhouse), The American Traitor (production at Playwrights Center of San Francisco), and Gringo Baseball (staged reading at Goodman Theatre in Chicago). She has designed lights for the world premieres of Bauer by Lauren Gunderson, 77% by Rinne Groff, and 1 2 3 by Lila Rose Kaplan, among others. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the former Associate Artistic Director at San Francisco Playhouse.

A Driving Beat

by Jordan Ramirez Puckett
1:00 pm, Saturday April 28th, Forum Theater, RTV Building

2,000 miles, a cross-country car ride
adopted son and mother travel side by side
white woman, brown son in the same space
9 states to the hospital, the teen’s birthplace
4 days, if all goes according to plan
5 nights, of doing all that they can
to find his birth mom, identity, or home
but by the end of their journey
will any answers be known?

Tickets for the Stage Readings are FREE and open to the public.

The MFA Playwrights and Faculty are proud to congratulate Jordan Ramirez Puckett as the recipient of the 2018 Scott McPhearson Playwriting Award

SCOTT MCPHERSON PLAYWRITING AWARD

In 2000, George Sherman, retired Ohio University professor emeritus of theater, established an endowment to create the Scott McPherson Playwriting Award to honor the all-too-brief life of OU graduate, Scott McPherson. Scott, who graduated from OU in 1981, was a renowned actor and playwright. He is best known for his critically acclaimed, award-winning play, Marvin’s Room.

Scott, who died of AIDS in 1992, often spoke eloquently, both in his writing and in interviews, of the personal and familial ravages of chronic illness and the need for loving support and connection with lovers, family, and friends. Upon establishment of the award, George Sherman wrote, “Scott was the least envious, most generous, amusing and supportive friend you could hope to have even if you happened to be another writer. He had his own ambitions, of course, but they never depended on someone else’s failure. He was there to support and encourage, if that’s what you needed; critique, if that’s what you requested, but always in a way that encouraged; therefore, it seems fitting and appropriate that an award designed to encourage new young talent should be made in his name, accomplishing the twin goals of remembering him for what he did and, as significantly, for who he was, and hopefully, through this award, who he shall continue to be.”

Marvin’s Room was first produced by the Goodman Theatre in 1990. It has also been produced at the Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut, Playwrights Horizons and Minetta Lane in New York City, and at The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It recieved the Drama Desk Award, the Oppenheimer Award, the Obie Drama Award, the John Whiting Foundation Award for Writing, the Joseph Jefferson Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. It was also made into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, and Hume Cronyn. He finished the screenplay only weeks before he died.

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Interview with 1st Year MFA Liv Matthews about Her Seabury Reading: She Moves In Her Own Way

April 25, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival officially opens tonight! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work. We’ve interviewed the 3rd Year MFA Playwrights, Philana, Cristina, and Natasha on their Featured Thesis Productions, and the 2nd Year MFA Playwrights, Inna, Katherine, and Trip about their Staged Readings. Next, we’ll learn more about the three 1st Year MFA Playwrights and their first full-length readings as part of the festival at OU!

First Year MFA Liv Matthews (pictured below!) was interviewed by Second Year MFA Inna Tsyrlin about her play, She Moves In Her Own Way.

Inna Tsyrlin: Your play, She Moves in Her Own Way has the world of ballet collide with the world of basketball, what inspired that?

Liv Matthews: I love dancing. I love watching it, I love being in classes, I love going out dancing. It’s been a part of my life artistically and socially since elementary school. Many of my full-length plays involve a moment of dance, and it was just a matter of time before I wrote a full out “dance play.”

Playing sports was never my thing but both of my younger siblings played basketball growing up and were very good at it. When I was in high school, I saw my brother catch the ball before it went out of bounds. He was on his toes, in relevé like a dancer, and after that moment I couldn’t help but see basketball and ballet being similar in terms of gracefulness, discipline, and swiftness. Also, basketball and the culture surrounding it is very intense and filled with conflict, and before I really considered it similar to dance, I always connected it to theatre. “What story is happening on the court or in the bleachers? Who’s the victor in the end? What impact does this loss have on the other team?” I’ve wanted to write a story about basketball for awhile and I can thank my siblings for that.

The play was also based on a Madness I did with Shon Middlebrooks and Erik Armstrong (both featured in my reading) that involved family and basketball. Those characters are wildly different now but I developed the play from those original five pages. When I began to outline the play, my protagonist, Alex, was a secondary character but she was causing so much conflict that I decided to form the play around her. She wants to dance but basketball is holding her back. I wanted a way to make these opposing forces blend together, and I remembered their physical similarities.

Inna: Are there any similarities between the characters of She Moves in Her Own Way and you? Any pieces of you in your characters?

Liv: I love to dance like Alex. I was never determined to consider myself a “dancer” the way Alex is, or the way I would call myself a playwright, but that enthusiasm for dance is definitely present. I also connect with her willingness to try something different and defy expectations. If someone has told her she can’t do something, she takes it as the very reason to do it and push through… Like a few characters in the play, I do enjoy basketball and see the beauty in it. And while Josh seems to be the character I’m least like, I did spend a lot of time reading and seeing Shakespeare in high school (by choice).

Inna: You take ballet classes, how has that helped you in writing this piece? Are there any parallels between ballet and playwriting?

Liv: While most of my dance experience is in tap and jazz, I took ballet because of the comparison I saw physically between ballet and basketball. When done well, they both seem very effortless, but I know dancers and basketball players train very aggressively in the basics, or what my brother would call “the fundamentals.” When learning the fundamentals of ballet in class, it puts me closer to Alex and what her possible experience is going through certain moves. I’m mentally taking notes. “When I do a développé eight times at the barre, Alex’s thighs may burn like this. If I do piqués across the floor, this is what her feet look like afterwards. When I botch a pirouette or bust out two, Alex could feel embarrassed or on top of the world.” I take these notes and apply them to my play.

Basketball, ballet, and playwriting are grounded in structure and learning the fundamentals, but knowing the rules and executing them in one’s own personal style is when they become exciting.

Inna: Your protagonist, Alex, listens to Tchaikovsky although her coach thinks she listens to Drake. Anyone on your playlist who might be a surprise? Anyone on your playlist that you want Alex to listen to?

Liv: I always say I’m not a big country music fan but I’m from the South, so it was always playing somewhere. In high school, I ended up knowing the lyrics to “Need You Now” by Lady Antebellum and I still really like that song. I’ve been a fan of Drake for a long time, and that song is like a country version of his song “Marvin’s Room.” It all comes together somehow.

Alex would listen to Cardi B when her parents aren’t around. Like me, she’s been listening to “I Like It” on repeat.

Inna: If you are hosting a dinner party, and anyone in the world could be at the table, who would you invite? Where would you host it? What are you making for dinner? What party game would you play?

Liv: While I was writing this play, I watched a few ballets and documentaries for inspiration, and I was very drawn to José Martinez, a former etoile for the Paris Opera Ballet, and Wendy Whelan, a former principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. They’re very strong and passionate when they dance and I want to know everything they know. I’d host it back home in Florida near a lake because the weather is nice. There’s a seafood soup I like to make so I’d whip that up for them. And no party games. They make my anxiety spike. Just good conversation and music.

Liv Matthews is a playwright from Central Florida. Her ten-minute play, “Home Going,” was produced by Playwrights’ Round Table in Orlando and is published in The Best 10 Minutes Plays of 2015 by Smith and Kraus. She has worked at the Alliance Theatre, first as a literary intern and then as the Kenny Leon Fellow. Her short play co-written with Dre Camacho, “White Picket Fence,” was produced by Working Title Playwrights in Atlanta. Her full-length plays explore family dynamics, the complexities of young women and teens, and the oddities and magic of the Sunshine State. And there’s often at least one dance number! When not writing, Liv can be found working through Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook Cravings, dancing to Beyoncé, and watching Desus and Mero on Viceland.

She Moves in Her Own Way

by Liv Matthews
1:30 pm, Friday April 27th, Forum Theater, RTV Building

Three seconds on the clock. Rolling Hills Middle School is down by two. All eyes are on point guard Alex Williams. She dribbles, pliés, and shoots the ball. It pirouettes in the rim and Alex’s mind leaps across time to her coach and former Atlanta Hawks player Anthony Prince. As the athletes wait for the ball to land, Alex’s journey through basketball and dance begins a duet with Anthony’s distant rise to NBA stardom.

Tickets for the Stage Readings are FREE and open to the public.

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Interview with 1st Year MFA Jean Egdorf about Her Seabury Reading: How to Bake a Genoise Sponge without Breaking Any Eggs

April 24, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival officially opens tonight! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work. We’ve interviewed the 3rd Year MFA Playwrights, Philana, Cristina, and Natasha on their Featured Thesis Productions, and the 2nd Year MFA Playwrights, Inna, Katherine, and Trip about their Staged Readings. Next, we’ll learn more about the three 1st Year MFA Playwrights and their first full-length readings as part of the festival at OU!

First Year MFA Jean Egdorf (pictured below!) was interviewed by Second Year MFA Trip Venturella about her play, How to Bake a Genoise Sponge without Breaking Any Eggs.

Trip Venturella: Your play centers on Melissa, a young woman with a popular online cooking show, who is aided by the figures of Sylvia Plath and Julia Child. If you had two spirits to help you with a cooking show, who would they be and why?

Jean Egdorf: The inspiration to make a Julia Child-esque character is pretty self-indulgent. Who wouldn’t want to have the spirit of Julia Child in the kitchen with them? I’ve spent hours watching her old cooking and baking episodes on PBS. Her energy and passion for cooking is so infectious; it would not only make cooking amazingly fun (more so, I already love being in the kitchen), but I bet the amount I’d learn from her would be tremendous.

The second spirit I’d want in my kitchen is still alive, but I’d choose Alton Brown. I love how he combines science with cooking, it’s so obvious yet so ingenious. I’m personally pretty haphazard in the kitchen when it comes to measurements (science? schmience!), and I bet my recipes would improve if I had someone reminding me why the science really matters. I have a line in my play about the chemical reactions that happen during baking, and if Alton Brown were there, he could actually explain them. I think in both these answers my secret desire is to be around people I’d learn a lot from.

Trip: I love that you’re working with Sylvia and Julia, by the way. What was the inspiration for using those figures in particular?

Jean: In our first semester, we had an assignment in a class from MFA Alum and School of Theatre Superstar Merri Biechler to come up with three seemingly disparate ideas that could come together for a project. I really wanted to write a play about baking, and I had always wanted to write a play somehow involving Sylvia Plath, so wondered: how would those two ideas come together? How do they connect? And then I remembered that Sylvie Plath committed suicide by gas poisoning after sealing off her kitchen and sticking her head in an open oven (sorry, morbid, I know). But suddenly how she was connected to a story about baking became clear… because I wasn’t going to just write a story about baking, but baking connected to dealing with mental illness. If Sylvia represented the side of the play dealing with mental illness, then Julia Child popped up as the clear choice to represent baking.

Trip: While often quite funny, your play deals with heavy topics: mental illness, depression, suicide. What do you hope audiences will learn about these topics once they’ve walked away from your play?

Jean: I think that mental illness, like many other conditions, is a part of the person living with it; how each individual lives with and manages that illness is a subjective process. Therapy and medication are important tools in that process, so I hope I don’t undermine their role in effective treatment, but I think that both as approaches raise interesting questions about what mental illness looks like for every individual and what “getting better” may mean for someone seeking to manage their symptoms. For Melissa, her mental illness is a part of her; in trying to override or remove that part of her life, what might she have to sacrifice instead? While I want to engage the audience with mental illness and how society as a whole tends to view it, I don’t know that I’m specifically looking to teach the audience anything concrete beyond being open to see the experience of mental illness as unique as the individual living with it, because this is only one young woman’s journey.

Trip: Melissa, like all of us, contains multitudes. What different creative personalities exist in you? How do you balance them in your own life, and your own writing?

Jean: So you know those right-brain/left-brain personality tests that pop up on social media every few months? My Facebook is a sea of right-brain people. Most of the people I know are in theatre or the arts in some capacity. So, right-brained makes sense, we’re all in the arts. But I’m an outlier. I’m consistently left-brained. My second favorite thing to write after plays is academic, critical essays of literature (citing peer reviewed journals, picking apart single lines of multi-hundred word novels, finding connections between other canonical works and theories, the works). I’m uber-analytical in everything I do, probably to a fault, but I think my penchant for analyzing minute connections is what makes my artistic style my own.

I’m also a stage manager, so of course superhuman detail-focus and organization are part of my success in that career. But even as a stage manager, my love for the work was for my role in the storytelling process. Overseeing the artistic integrity of a production and pulling the puppet strings which execute all the tiny pieces that create a cohesive collaboration is thrilling; I think that the intimate understanding of a play that is required from a stage manager has a lot of overlap with the effective construction of a story by a playwright.

Trip: On that topic, what dialogue are you attempting to have with Plath and Child’s work (poetry, cooking) in your play?

Jean: I cut the specific line (kill your darlings…), but I had Melissa say at some point that poetry is a lot like a recipe, only with images and language instead of ingredients. Melissa’s engagement with baking is very poetic; I think she sees putting a recipe together as artistic a craft as writing poetry, and so her language to describe her recipes reflects that. Both Julia Child and Sylvie Plath were incredibly passionate and committed to their crafts, and I think that’s the spirit I wanted them to bring most to the play.

Trip: For a long time you lived in Creede, Colorado; population 400. How have you adjusted to livin’ the fast life in the big city of Athens, OH?

Jean: I love small towns. I’m not a city girl. I lived in Denver for a decade, and that was too much. My hometown in New Mexico is also smaller than Athens, so the majority of my life has been spent in places where businesses close before midnight, the closest Walmart is 45 minutes to over an hour away, where there’s only one bar, where kids (and dogs…) roam around the streets in general safety without parental supervision, where you can look up in the sky at night and see billions of stars thanks to an utter lack of light pollution. Again I’m in a weird minority: Athens feels big to me. The size to traffic ratio is all off. I’m actually looking forward to the summer when we hit “the off season” with the student body majority gone.

But it is really convenient to be able to buy groceries at off hours of the night and order a pizza at two in the morning.

Also, did you know there’s a lot of oxygen here?! I’ve never in my life lived this close to sea level (prior to this, the lowest elevation I ever lived in was in the Mile High City itself… 5280 represent!). Breathing normally is weird.

Jean Egdorf was born and raised in a small town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Her plays often feature young women from a small town, and her work is often influenced by the deserts and isolation of the southwest. Jean is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association and has worked for the past decade as a stage manager and dramaturg. Her full-length plays include The Flood and Poetic License Will Be Taken. Her short plays have been produced in Colorado, and her short dramaturgical essays have been published for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. Jean worked six seasons with the Creede Repertory Theatre (CRT) where she co-developed the CRT Company Generated Ten-Minute Play Festival, now entering its fifth year, and currently serves as a member of CRT’s Headwaters New Play Festival reading committee.

How to Bake a Genoise Sponge without Breaking Any Eggs

by Jean Egdorf
1:00 pm, Thursday April 26th, Forum Theater, RTV Building

Hello, bakers! Thank you for joining me for this very special episode of Melissa B’s Genoise. Today we’re making the trickiest cake there is: the genoise sponge. I better be able to perfect this recipe if I’m going to make it studying pastry at Le Cordon Bleu! My mom and my therapist think I’ll crumble under the stress, but I’m sure with help of my friends, Ms. J and Sylvie, neither me or my cake will fall apart.

Tickets for the Stage Readings are FREE and open to the public.

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Interview with 2nd Year MFA Trip Venturella about His Seabury Reading: The Water Baby

April 23, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival officially opens tonight! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work. We’ve interviewed the 3rd Year MFA Playwrights, Philana, Cristina, and Natasha on their Featured Thesis Productions, now learn a little more about the upcoming staged readings presented by the 2nd and 1st Year MFA Playwrights!

Second Year MFA Trip Venturella (pictured below!) was interviewed by Third Year MFA Natasha Renee Smith about his play, The Water Baby.

Natasha (Nat) Renee Smith: This is the second play you’ve written about this family. What is it about their story that speaks to you?

Trip Venturella: Is “I’m lazy” an acceptable answer? Probably not.

I started writing something last May that involved a story crashing to the ground. I didn’t quite know what it meant at the time, but I new I needed a vehicle to examine the promises and security that vanish when a powerful story collapses. I decided on an intergenerational tale, one that would take place over several decades. I have also been interested in stories from my own family. How has my family’s relationship to the United States changed from when my Great-Great Grandparents sailed over to today? How might we view what my ancestors said and did when they first arrived in the United States today? To be fair, there is virtually nothing in the story of Theo Tombras that resembles the stories of my family. What I am interested in is the way a dream can betray you, and how you recover from that.

Nat: You use a lot of mythical elements in your playwriting. Why do you think you’re so drawn to that type of storytelling?

Trip: I like you calling my writing “mythical!” I have always been interested in the fables, myths, and stories onstage because they give me a chance to explore interior world externally. If we watch a play to see human stories – a protagonist overcoming their worst fears, or two lovers trying to be together despite the odds – mythic elements provide an avenue to externalize the psychological turmoil of the people onstage. There are other techniques to achieve the same ends, expressionistic, naturalistic, and surreal, but myth has the advantage of being grandiose. I like stories that have a wide sweep, a bit of a religious feel to them, so I think that’s why I’m drawn to that type of storytelling.

Nat: What parallels do you notice between 1930s America and today?

Trip: They are numerous. First, a major economic calamity defined that entire decade, much as it has this decade. The specifics of the economy is very different between then and now – inequality is much worse today, for example – but I think there is a similar sense of exertion as we’ve lifted ourselves up out of the wreckage created by unchecked financialization. Second, and this is something mostly forgotten, the late 20’s and 30’s were a time of intense xenophobia. Immigrants from Southern Europe, as well as their decedents, were not yet accepted as full citizens. The Immigration Act of 1924 had slowed immigration to a trickle, and that, on top of the desperation of the depression, created a country that was openly hostile to immigrants. Finally, the Hoover administration was one of the most incompetent administrations in American history. Not only did they worsen the effects of the Depression by imposing tariffs and adhering to the gold standard, but they scapegoated Mexican-Americans as a convenient nemesis during the downturn. The idiotic polity resulting from said scapegoating was the Mexican Repatriation Program. The federal government deported between one and two million people. The majority of them were citizens.

So, as you can see, there are several parallels, and they are the reason I became interested in this time period for this play. Contemporary events are often discussed as if they have no precedent, but I think if we don’t look at today’s world in the context of history, we end up repeating the same mistakes. I, personally, would rather not have this decade, or the next decade, or any decade after that, end the way the 1930’s ended.

Nat: One of the ideas of this play is how our consciences can viscerally affect us. Have you ever had something like that happen in your life?

Trip: I’m a fairly conscientious person, so I try not to get into situations where my conscience is bugging me, but I can provide an example that will make me look lame, but provides evidence for why I write about conscience so often. A while ago, my family and I had stopped off the highway at a brewery in Western Massachusetts. It was a fairly large brewery with a restaurant attached, with all the trappings – good burgers, board games in a loft above the bar, signature beer glasses, and whatnot. Now, we are a large family and all of us are adults, so we spent a considerable amount of money on drinks and food. Some members of my family (who shall remain nameless but who, as a hint to our readers, gave birth to me) took this as license to slip some of the brewery’s signature beer glasses into their purse and walk out the door with them. I considered this to be both bad and wrong. I realize that the beer glasses probably cost fifty cents apiece, and we undoubtedly spent enough money there for the brewery to purchase an entire phalanx of beer glasses, but damn if I did not feel deeply guilty walking out of that brewery. In retrospect, it is kind of nice to have those glasses as a memory of that trip with my family (yes, I kept one of them), nicer than it would have been to not experience the pang of guilt I felt walking out of the brewery. I think I write about conscience so much because I’m interested in the judgements we have to make while it bears down on us, and the consequences of those decisions in retrospect. What if the decision our conscience is telling us to make is really the wrong one? What if we are really supposed to take those beer glasses? As I enjoy looking things at their inverse, so I enjoy looking at our conscience as it is refracted through time. And no, I’m not endorsing stealing beer glasses from breweries.

Nat: What relationship in this play fascinates you the most?

Trip: I think the heart of the story is the conflict between Theo, a man who isn’t who he says he is, and Alexandra, a woman seeking a new life in America. Both of them have their reasons for believing in the “American Dream,” and their disillusion with it is experienced as disillusionment with each other. They both want better things for themselves, but the way they seek those better things put them at odds, until it finally crashes to the ground. When it does, though, what comes out of the wreckage? Come see “The Water Baby,” and find out!

Trip Venturella’s full-length plays include Killer Maples: The Musical! (Yelling Man Theatre), Shahid, and The Water Baby (both OU Seabury Quinn Playfest). He has acted, directed, and written with the human rights group ANHAD: Kashmir, Delhi University in New Delhi, Floating Space Theatre Company in Sri Lanka, and served as the Director of Development of Apollinaire Theatre Company in Boston. His work as a dramaturg includes Stupid F*cking Bird (Ohio University Theatre Division), and this summer, Next to Normal (Tantrum Theater). His essays on the intersection of art and urban planning have appeared in HowlRound.

The Water Baby

by Trip Venturella, directed by Ernesto Ponce
4:00 pm, Saturday April 28th, Forum Theater, RTV Building

The year is 1930, and Theofanis Tombras has returned from his tour of duty in the Marines with an unnamed baby in tow. He finds a country bruised by economic crisis; Alexandra, his arranged fiancée, stranded across the ocean; and an unlikely opportunity offered by an old friend. As a better life beckons, it becomes clear to his young family that Theo will sacrifice nearly anything to sustain his growing ambition, and contain the specters of his past.

Tickets for the Stage Readings are FREE and open to the public.

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Interview with 2nd Year MFA Katherine Varga about Her Seabury Reading: Cora

April 22, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival officially opens tonight! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work. We’ve interviewed the 3rd Year MFA Playwrights, Philana, Cristina, and Natasha on their Featured Thesis Productions, now learn a little more about the upcoming staged readings presented by the 2nd and 1st Year MFA Playwrights!

Second Year MFA Katherine Varga (pictured below!) was interviewed by Third Year MFA Philana Omorotionmwan about her play, Cora.

Philana Omorotionmwan: Cora is set in a world in which people can separate themselves from their hearts, which allows them to perform their jobs more efficiently. What inspired you to write this play?

Katherine Varga: I was originally inspired by a workshop from Michael Bigelow Dixon, who encourages playwrights to embrace theatricality in the 21^st century. During his talk, he challenged us to create theatre that reflects what living in the digital age is like – an age where you’re constantly bombarded with vivid imagery and sharp contrasts (just scroll through your social media feed!). While I don’t think I lived up to his challenge, I was interested in exploring the effects of constant exposure to horrifying news, and our desire for instant gratification.

In the world of Cora, when you separate yourself from your heart you need to hire an Ellie (which is basically a digitalized room) to keep it safe. Since most of my friends and family live outside of Ohio, I spend a lot of my time communicating with them through my phone and laptop. Sometimes it feels like my heart is trapped inside a computer.

Philana: A little birdie told me that you didn’t outline this play before you wrote it. Can you talk a little more about what your process was like and how that may have differed from the way you approached writing previous plays?

Katherine: I started writing last semester based on a premise: “What would happen if computers could babysit our hearts?” I didn’t have much time to start something new but was worried if I didn’t start writing, I’d lose my excitement for the idea. I started writing three pages by hand every morning before I got out of bed. They were sort of in order, but if I was struggling I’d just jump ahead to whatever scene interested me that day. If I couldn’t think of anything, I’d force myself to just write a throwaway scene – usually by the third page I’d have discovered something interesting about the characters or the world.

For previous plays, I’ve written first drafts having a good idea of where I was going – usually an outline, or at least a list of major scenes. With this play, I had no idea where it was going, and I often didn’t know a scene would exist until I was writing it. Once I had a substantial amount of pages, I went back to my outlining comfort zone to put together a coherent draft (and ended up throwing out a lot of the pages I wrote). But I really enjoyed letting myself discover moments in the play through writing pages.

Philana: As a second-year playwright, you get to collaborate with a director for your staged reading. I know it’s still a little early, but how does working with a director influence your process?

Katherine: Working with a director is rejuvenating. It helps me look at my own play with new eyes and often opens up opportunities in the text I hadn’t realized were there. So far I’ve only had one talk with Olivia, my Playfest director, but she’s insightful and creative and I’m really excited to get into the rehearsal room with her.

Philana: What play (or playwright) do you read over and over again, and what keeps bringing you back to it (or them)?

Katherine: I’m going to go rogue and answer with a musical! Technically, the main reason I’ve listened to Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days over and over again is that I have the original cast recording in my car, and it’s a nice way to pass the time on long car drives. But I also love the journey I go on when listening to the album. The songs are full of great character-driven language (and some lovely internal rhymes). The Deb/Warren storyline in particular exemplifies the types of stories I’m drawn to – a friendship love story that celebrates art and appreciating everyday moments.

Philana: If your play were a flavor of ice cream, what would it be and why?

Katherine: A twist, because the play’s split into two stories. The Woman is vanilla (because she doesn’t have a heart) and Cora is chocolate.

Katherine Varga is a millennial playwright working through her love-hate relationship with the Internet. Her first play Energy Mass Light was selected for a developmental staged reading at the Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, NY and was later student-produced on the University of Rochester campus. Her shorter plays have been seen at Writers & Books (Rochester), the 2015 First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival, 20% Theatre Company (Chicago), and Curious Theatre (Denver). Her full-length screenplay It’s Not Rocket Science was a finalist in the 2017 LezPlay Contest. She also freelances as an arts journalist for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, a Gannett paper. Website: http://katherinevarga.weebly.com

Cora

by Katherine Varga, directed by Olivia Rocco
4:00 pm, Friday April 27th, Forum Theater, RTV Building

A young photojournalist travels overseas to document war crimes. But first, she must agree to leave her heart behind. Fortunately, her news corporation has state-of-the-art technology to ensure the hearts are protected and thoroughly entertained. Cora explores how a digital culture that connects us to the world can separate us from ourselves.

Tickets for the Stage Readings are FREE and open to the public.

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Interview with 2nd Year MFA Inna Tsyrlin about Her Seabury Reading: Exodus of Dreams

April 21, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival officially opens tonight! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work. We’ve interviewed the 3rd Year MFA Playwrights, Philana, Cristina, and Natasha on their Featured Thesis Productions, now learn a little more about the upcoming staged readings presented by the 2nd and 1st Year MFA Playwrights!

Second Year MFA Inna Tsyrlin (pictured below!) was interviewed by Third Year MFA Cristina Luzárraga about her play, Exodus of Dreams.

Cristina Luzárraga: Your play Exodus Of Dreams is about Russian Jewish immigrants in New York. As a Russian Jewish immigrant to Australia, what do you see as the differences between the American and Australian immigration experience?

Inna Tsyrlin: The wave of Russian Jewish immigrants from the late 80s to mid-nineties all had similar experiences, irrespective of where they ended up. A majority came to America; then many went to Israel; some to Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Many of these immigrants, myself included, experience a mix of gratitude to be free from Soviet anti-Semitism and a strong nostalgia for Soviet culture that is difficult to replicate in Western countries. The assimilation of Russian Jews into Australian society is more evident than in American society, but that’s mainly to do with the larger population of these immigrants to America. I would say that irrespective of where Russian Jews are, leaving the former Soviet Union was a necessity and there is immense appreciation to those countries who opened their doors to us.

Cristina: Trump has obviously changed the state of immigration in the U.S., and your plays are often politically charged. How does Exodus Of Dreams relate to the current climate?

Inna: My intension with Exodus Of Dreams was to write a play that focusses on the story of an immigrant family looking for salvation and opportunity in America. The current administration wants to literally wipe out immigration to America, a country that, despite its strict immigration policy (even before Trump coming to office), was known as a country of immigrants not only from a historical perspective but as part of its identity. If my play sheds a new light or reaffirms the importance of both continuing immigration to America – and other Western counties – and supporting immigrants who try to build new lives post their arrival, then I feel like I’ve added something to the heated and currently fraught conversation on immigration.

Cristina: Your characters are very committed to keeping kosher. What’s your own relationship like to Jewish laws and tradition?

Inna: I’m Jewish in faith, ethnicity and identity. How much I practice or don’t practice changes as I feel a greater pull to certain aspects of the faith, while other aspects I’m still attempting to understand. I’ve always been told that because I went to a Jewish school, my parents and grandparents felt more connected to Judaism, something they never physically experienced in the Soviet Union, like having a seder (Passover meal) every year since we came to Australia.

Cristina: Your play centers on the dilemma of transplanting a pig heart into a human. How close is this to reality? When might we expect to start harvesting animal organs?

Inna: From the research that I’ve found the answer is soon. There are shortages of human organs and animals are probably the next best thing, as long as the human body can accept the organ. Additionally, the chromosome structures of pigs are very close to our own, so the idea of pig organs being a viable option isn’t far-fetched. There’s the saying “you are what you eat”, perhaps it will be a phrase that isn’t only apt for healthy eating.

Cristina: There is a talking pig in your play. If you could have a talking animal as a friend, what would it be, and why?

Inna: Can I just be friends with all the animals in the zoo? Animals are fascinating to me and I’d love to get their perspectives on life; from the ones that fly to the ones that crawl. Can you imagine what it would be like to have a bat describe its life and compare that to what a platypus may tell us? I’d like to ask my dog a few things; like would he prefer to watch a rom com or thriller… I like getting a group consensus on the important things.

Inna Tsyrlin at five years of age left Russia to emigrate to Australia where her and her family no longer had to face an anti-Semitic social and politic system. She now lives in America, trying to reconcile her own identity and politics in her writing. Her plays include Tattoo on My Arm (The Rising Sun Performance Company 2017 Lab Series, NY); I (Heart) Subway and Happy Anniversary (one acts for Emerging Artists Theater, NY); My Wife (HB Playwrights Foundation Shorts Festival, NY); and Principal’s Office (semi-finalist of Manhattan Repertory 2014 One Act Competition). More info: innatsyrlin.com

New American Dreams

by Inna Tsyrlin
4:00 pm, Thursday April 26th, Forum Theater, RTV Building

Can a kosher child live with a non-kosher heart? While Avram struggles to integrate himself and his family into American society, and meets constant obstacles in keeping his faith, his daughter befriends a pig. This pig may be the answer to the family’s heart transplant predicament, but if Avram accepts a pig’s heart for his sick daughter, will he still be a good Jew?

Tickets for the Stage Readings are FREE and open to the public.

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Interview with 3rd Year MFA Natasha Renee Smith About Her Featured Seabury Production: Vessel

April 20, 2018
by ouplaywrights
· Current Students · Festival · News · Seabury Quinn, Jr.

The 24th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival is almost here! The featured, Thesis Productions of our Third Year MFA Playwrights debut this weekend in Kantner Hall on the Elizabeth Evans Baker Stage. To celebrate the opening of the featured productions, and leading up to the festival staged readings on the 26th, 27th, and 28th, we will be featuring daily interviews with the current playwrights about their work.

Third Year MFA Natasha Renee Smith (pictured below!) was interviewed by First Year MFA Jean Egdorf about her play, Vessel.

Jean Egdorf: For anyone who saw your second-year reading of Vessel in last year’s Play Fest, they are in for a brand new experience of the script; what are some highlights of your experience in getting to work with a script over two years, from staged reading to full production?

Natasha (Nat) Renee Smith: New play development can take years, and I’m still figuring out how to be a playwright. So my journey with Vessel has taken me all over the place. At first I was very focused on structure, then I let the creative process take over, and this year I think the two have started to balance each other. I feel lucky to have had so many wonderful collaborations; Anne and Carson were both involved in my second-year reading, so they have helped this play through its many iterations. When we finally got into production, it was like bunch of puzzle pieces coming together at last. And I’ve learned so much about the play in the rehearsal process! Now I’m ready to take a step back—when you’re this wrapped up for this long, it’s hard to be objective about your own work.

Jean: Your play includes a number of images and ideas that seem like they would be disparate, yet come together in harmony (the metronome/music, biology and bacteria, chaos theory…). What inspired you to build these images into your play?

Nat: I have no idea. I try to have a sense of my artistic process (and purpose), but it’s difficult to track how everything develops. The images I work hardest to find do nothing for my play and get cut, while images that randomly appear really resonate. I suppose that’s what artists mean when they talk about “flow” and accessing the unconscious. Obviously, it’s not really random—but it happens in ways that can be surprising. Of course, one image often leads to another. Magnets are connected to metronomes, which are connected to music, and so on. I write many, many, many drafts. As the story shifts, so do the images, and sometimes I lose moments I loved in rewrites. Playwriting is like breaking your own heart over and over again.

Jean: Your play is set at MIT. Did you ever want to pursue an education in STEM fields?

Nat: I went through a phase where I really wanted to go to MIT. I always did well in math—and I really enjoyed problem-solving. When I was a junior in high school, I advanced to the second round of the American Math Competition. I was pulled out of classes for a day to study with the other six people from my school who had advanced. They were all boys, and I felt totally out of place. I avoided a lot of pursuits I might have enjoyed because I didn’t feel safe or welcome in all-male spaces. And I was terrified of failure. In the arts, there’s a lot more freedom to be yourself. Both are challenging, but in different ways.

Jean: What sort of research did you undertake for writing this play? How did it compare to your usual process of incorporating research into a script?

Nat: I was really intimidated at first and thought I needed endless research. I read books, dug through websites, tracked down articles… I think a part of me wanted to sound really smart! I still worry that I should have done more research, but I pulled back for a reason. It’s easy to take one idea and run with it, and notice too late that it’s clouding the story. So I pruned a lot of the explicit scientific research. I tried to keep the most evocative language and beautiful images. Hopefully, everything I’ve learned about chaos theory can be put to use in another play someday!

Jean: You use piano music throughout your play. What is your favorite composition/who is your favorite composer?

Nat: My dad is a classical pianist, so I grew up hearing piano music constantly—and I can’t hear Rachmaninoff or Debussy without thinking of him. When I was a kid, he would test me and my siblings by playing the opening bars of a movement of a Beethoven symphony. We had to guess which one it was. I also played cello, and loved Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. So hearing classical music often takes me back to childhood.

Natasha Renee Smith studied playwriting at Amherst College with Constance Congdon, where her play In Her Place (Denis Johnston Playwriting Award) was produced. Through a Civic Engagement Fellowship, Nat spent the summer of 2010 teaching fiction writing in Nairobi, Kenya. The three-time recipient of the Roland Wood Fellowship, she apprenticed at Horizon Theatre Company and interned at the Alliance Theatre and Arizona Theatre Company, where her play Catapult was featured in the Café Bohemia Reading Series. Her ten-minute play “Tried” was a KCACTF Region 2 semi-finalist; “The Party,” a monologue, appears in My Mother#!^!#! College Life (Dramatic Publishing 2017). She writes about unsettling facets of love and family, illuminating the deceptive beauty of human flaws.

Vessel

by Natasha Renee Smith, directed by Anne McAlexander
2:00 pm – April 21st & 28th, Elizabeth Baker Theater, Kantner Hall
8:00 pm – April 26th, Elizabeth Baker Theater, Kantner Hall

Metronomes are controlled by magnets. Magnets are controlled by the Earth. The Earth is controlled by the sun. Who—or what—controls Tiana? The MIT sophomore enters into dual orbit with Luke, a professor of chaos theory. This darkly romantic play explores mental illness, power dynamics, and the poetry of visceral pain.

Tickets for the Featured Productions are $5 general admission or FREE for OU Students (with valid student ID) through Arts for Ohio; available at the Templeton–Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium box office.

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