As a part of the Seventh Biennial Fred Gaines Student Playwright Series, the Lawrence University Theatre Arts Department will be putting on three one-act plays on Feb. 20, 21 and 22 in the Cloak Theatre. These plays all fall under one theme, “Everything That Haunts Us,” as all three contain elements of death, hauntings and the afterlife.
These plays were written in a playwriting course taught by J. Thomas and Julie E. Hurvis Professor of Theatre and Drama and Professor of Theatre Arts Timothy Troy, the Series Artistic Director and Stage Director for “House on the Hill” and “Static Cling.” According to junior Shira Hanovich, the playwright for “This Isn’t How It Happens,” the theme came about naturally during the class.
“There is a playwriting course taught every other year, and I was in that with [around] seven other people, and our final project was to write a one-act play,” Hanovich said. “They picked three plays that worked well together, and the theme they ended up settling on [was “Everything That Haunts Us” because] lots of people wrote about dead people.”
Although students wrote these plays, they aren’t allowed to actually produce or direct them. For “This Isn’t How It Happens,” Jacque Troy is serving as the Series Dramaturg, Scene Coach and Stage Director.
When asked to describe their play, Hanovich said, “There’s a woman named Kate. She’s dead. This is her funeral, except she’s awake and talking, and something isn’t right. It’s something along those lines. But this is a funeral, and the funeral isn’t working.”
The second one-act play premiering is “The House on the Hill,” written by Madeline Guest ‘24. This play also follows the theme “Everything That Haunts Us,” detailing one boy’s journey to the afterlife.
“This kid kind of gets thrown into this place, and he doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know why he’s there, and he finds out very quickly that he’s dead,” Guest said. “And there are three other kids there that basically died very suddenly and now get to work on stuff that they didn’t get to do or accomplish. But it becomes clear to him relatively quickly that it’s more like a purgatory where things stay the same.”
Although the plays are being performed now, they were written several months ago, leaving a lot of time for them to be reviewed, edited and revised. For Guest, the most challenging part was getting the words on the page.
“Starting is always the hardest thing, right?” Guest said. “Because you start and it’s a blank page, and you can’t edit a blank page, unfortunately, so then you’re just panicking over every single thing you could be writing or you should be writing.”
The last one-act play being performed is “Static Cling” by senior Nina Broberg, a play she described as “a little bit of a psychological piece about whether or not [a haunting] is real, and if it actually makes a difference if it’s real or not, based on the psychological effect of it. So, it’s about a young woman who believes she’s being haunted by her dead sister.”
Broberg, like Hanovich and Guest, expressed excitement in seeing her play actually performed.
“I am really happy with how it looks so far. It’s cool to see something come out of my brain and then see it actually realized, and how different it is to what I thought it was going to be,” Broberg said. “I think it’s been pretty rewarding to get to see people bring it to life, to get to hear it spoken, because, I mean, plays as an art form are meant to be heard and not read. So, it’s been really awesome to see it come to life.”