Into the writer’s mind: Annual festival of 10-minute plays allows student playwrights to showcase their talents
Originality is the name of the game when USU Theater opens its Festival of New Plays on March 30. The plays run until April 1 in the Black Box theater in the Fine Arts Building. The festival is filled with plays written and directed by, and starring USU students.
“Each one is very differeng from the other plays,” said recent USU graduate Jed Broberg, who also wrote “Bird Flu over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” one of the plays that will performed during the festival. “There is a good mix of drama and comedy this year.”
Also new this year is the introduction of flash plays.
“Flash plays are very short plays, probably about three minutes on average that focus on one incident, and feel like that they are excerpts from a bigger play,” Broberg said.
Flash plays are just another way the festival keeps up on the latest developments in playwriting and what is going on in the world.
“The festival of new plays has been around for awhile and it just keeps getting bette,” Broberg said. “A few years ago, Mark Damon, the advisor for the playwriting classes, heard about a new concept called 10-minute plays. Now there are 10-minute play festivals all over the country. Now we are doing flash plays, its great the way the festival is evolving.”
Richie Call, a senior in performing arts and writer of “Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask,” said that, “Originally, ‘Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask,’ was a flash play, centering around one incident between two friends, but I wanted to see what happened in the future so I wrote that part in, then at the end I added a part that is before the incident that started out the play, and now it is a 10-minute play.”
Some of this year’s plays began with even less material than an entire scene.
Jeff Broberg’s play, “Bird Flu over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” started with him coming up with the title and letinng the drama follow.
“I came up with ‘Bird Flu over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ after I had been given the assignment to write a play on whatever I wanted. I laughed at the title for some time,” Broberg said. “Only after I was watching Alfred Hitchocks’ movie ‘The Birds’ did the idea of two hypochondriacs who are married to each other, with the husband reading the paper and misreading the headlines into doom and gloom while the wife watches ‘The Birds’ really fill out the play. ‘Bird Flu over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is really about how society focuses more on who got voted off the island than about major issues like bird flu, which is a big deal.”
Unlike the comedy in “Bird Flu over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Call’s “Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask” is about the evolution of friendship after a certain incident.
“[The] main issue [of ‘Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask,’] is tolerance, because everyday someone will ask why are we different. Though the play has been described as dealing with homosexuality and looking at how far we as a society have come and how far we have to go, it originally didn’t start out that way,” Call said. “I didn’t intend to write about sexuality at all, it was just a flash play about two friends. The play has actually gone through about ten revisions, and at one time was even a comedy but it has come full circle.”
Other 10-minute plays include “Carpe Diem” by Lindsay Koppen, an adaptation from “Dr. Faustus” and “Olympic Buffalo” by Maryanne Kimball, a play that comments on what a relationship is, how they develop and how opposites sometimes really do attract.
The four 10-minute plays along with eight flash plays will be performed at the Black Box Theater starting at 7:30 p.m. at a cost of 5 dollars a person, but Call and Broberh recommend showing up around 7 p.m. as the Black Box only holds about 100 people and the plays are very popular.
“Be prepared for an intimate and exciting time” Broberg said. The Black Box is a small theater that allows the actor be two feet from the audience while just being shot or preparing to ask a girl out, he added.
“It makes it very real and exciting,” Call said.
Be advised that there is some language during the performances but nothing that would warrant an R-rating.
-nealmsnow@cc.usu