Grad students to showcase master’s theses in New Play Festival

A hurricane, Civil War re-enactors and religious philosophy. This may seem to be a random assortment of nouns, but they are all subjects of three new plays written by UCLA’s own graduate playwrights.

The New Play Festival, running today through Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, features three plays written by third-year graduate playwriting students.

Written during their second year at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, these full-length plays are their theses for their master’s degrees.

Rather than produce the plays with an undergraduate cast as has been done in the past, this year’s plays will be read by professional actors at the theatre center.

“(The festival) is an opportunity for the students to hear their plays in a professional space with actors who are the right age and ethnicity for the parts. … (The playwrights) have an opportunity to get feedback from professional actors and directors,” said Edit Villarreal, a professor and chair of the Masters of Fine Arts Playwriting Program in UCLA’s theater department.

Craig Jessen, one of the playwrights who learned under Villarreal and who will be featured in the festival, wrote “Babel Belly” last year.

“It’s a story about … people who are pursuing different paradigms of belief, and the expedition of how one changes, subtracts or adds to their perception of transcendence. And it’s funny,” Jessen said.

The play examines the crises of faith that a minister and his family face. Each family member approaches their crisis with a different perspective. For example, the son develops a coping mechanism based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

“I was interested in writing a story about faith … and about family. I wanted to try and approach the subject with equal respect to all congregations,” Jessen said.

Jessen’s fellow graduate playwriting student, Ayla Harrison, developed an interest in the writing aspect of theater while she studied acting at the University of Central Florida.

The festival will feature Harrison’s play, “Swell Season.”

“It’s this strange coming-of-age comedy about a young director that realizes the limits of reality and faces the reality of growing up, but he is confronted with these realities through very comical situations and a gigantic hurricane,” Harrison said.

Based loosely on her own experience in Florida when three hurricanes simultaneously hit her university, “Swell Season” explores what happens when a young filmmaker, his girlfriend and a cameraman must face a hurricane and an angry drug dealer.

“It’s about how we overcome our mistakes, embarrassment and what scares us, all the while being able to laugh at it,” Harrison said.

Playwright Alex Maggio wrote “Lost Cause,” a play about Civil War re-enactors, after reading a book about the subject called “Confederates in the Attic” by Tony Horwitz.

After receiving a degree in anthropology at Yale and teaching history, Maggio decided to study playwriting.

“I took a playwriting class as an elective. … I was fascinated with telling a story just through dialogue. … It’s closer to real life. … We can’t read people’s minds, we can only hear what they have to say,” Maggio said.

His play revolves around the relationships and denials of two Dartmouth College debate team members who become involved in a Civil War re-enactment on the Confederate side.

Maggio said he has always been interested in the way people try to pay homage to the confederacy without acknowledging the negative connotations.

“I want people to recognize that when you approach history you have to take it all in at once. You can’t pick and choose which elements of the past you want to enjoy and ignore,” Maggio said.

Readings of the three plays at the New Play Festival provide the opportunity for the playwrights to receive feedback from professionals in the theater field and for viewers to get a glimpse into the development of these new plays.

“They’re very different works. (“˜Babel Belly’) is rather serious, dealing with religion, how you connect with your congregation in modern times. “˜Swell Season’ is a physical comedy, and “˜Lost Cause’ is an interesting look at a historical period, how we choose to iconize it, romanticize it, remember it. They have different theatrical goals,” Villarreal said.