The UCLA Theater Department’s annual New Play Festival has been showing original plays by graduate playwright students for years.
This year, however, the festival hopes to break boundaries with a set of plays expressing outlandish issues not usually explored on stage, including futuristic drama and unconventional comedy.
The festival launched this past weekend with “Rehearsing the Persian Stain,” a comedy about a Julia Roberts-type actress who self-produces an off-off Broadway play. The next two productions in the New Play Festival, “Keeping Track” and “In the Company of Jane Doe,” deal with the more futuristic issues of human microchip tracking and cloning, respectively.
“If you can imagine it, it can be put onstage,” said Erica Saenz, a third-year playwright graduate student and writer of “Keeping Track.”
The New Play Festival is the culmination of a two-term script development program in which the playwrights work with graduate directors during the spring of the previous year.
Casting for this year occurred during the first week of fall quarter. Auditions were open to all theater students, and this year, an unprecedented 60 students auditioned.
“There was a genuine excitement about “˜Let’s do new plays,'” said Gary Gardner, vice chair of the undergraduate theater program and faculty advisor for the festival. “Our undergrads understand that new plays are important.”
Gardner attributed some of the excitement to the fact that this year each play was given a $2,000 budget. This budget allowed undergraduate designers to participate in the productions for the first time, which Gardner believes is fundamental to their development as artists.
In previous shows, actors typically wore their own clothing and set pieces were minimal as there were no funds for materials.
“The undergrads haven’t always had as many projects (as the graduates),” he said. “For them to have a show they actually (designed) on their resume is very important.”
Rachel Hanzel, a second-year theater student and costume designer for “Keeping Track,” is both excited and nervous about this new opportunity.
“It’s really intimidating as the opening approaches because this is the first show I’ve done,” she said. “But it’s also exciting because it’s a realization that I can actually do what I love.”
“Keeping Track,” which premieres Thursday, tells the story of a large multicultural family whose members can’t stay out of each other’s business. However, the family has the advantage of a tracking device to keep tabs on its members.
“I wanted to give it a contemporary twist with the whole microchip tracking issue and not make it a social commentary on how I feel about the tracking,” Saenz said. “But the most important thing to me was that it be funny and that these people’s relationships were as true as they could be.”
The show’s director, Efrain Schunior, a third-year directing graduate student, feels that the original project has the materials needed for a successful first production run.
“It’s been nice to collaborate with actors on a really good script that’s also a new script. That doesn’t happen very often,” he said.
The next show in the quirky line-up, “In the Company of Jane Doe,” is about a corporate executive who clones herself. The production runs from Nov. 29 to Dec. 1.
The subject of the play came to Tiffany Antone, a third-year graduate playwright student and writer of the play, in an unusual way.
“I had a really weird dream, and when I woke up from the dream I was like, “˜Oh, that’s what I’m going to write my next play about,'” she said. “It’s a play about a woman who wants to have everything but is doing all the wrong things to get it.”
Yet despite the fantastical nature of the play’s premise, Mary Jo DuPrey, a second-year directing graduate student and director of this show, believes it has a real message.
“The play is about learning how to hold on and accept all the parts of ourselves,” she said. “It’s about all the things that we do to ourselves to try to change and become more perfect and how that brings us away from who we are.”
Kate Bergstrom, the second-year theater student who plays Jane Doe, finds that the play’s message directly applies to her own life.
“When I first read the script, I thought this would be so fun to play because I am nothing like a business woman,” she said. “(However) I only discovered I may very well be more similar to this character in real life than any other character I’ve ever played.”
While the plays may deal with unconventional topics, they all relate to issues in modern society and even the oddest elements may be applicable to everyday life.
“I guarantee (you) haven’t seen anything like it,” Antone said.