Making it to the main stage
By John Guigayoma
Jan. 30, 2008 9:02 p.m.
The Little Theater is Macgowan Hall’s main stage, and as far as playwrights go, it’s usually reserved for the big dogs. Canonical heavyweights like Shakespeare, Molière and Brecht have all graced the theater’s playbills in recent years.
But with Friday’s debut of “A Small Pair of Feet in the Middle of the Sea” and “Random Acts,” graduate-written plays get a chance in the spotlight. “Small Pair” is a full-length work, but “Random Acts” consists of five 10-minute pieces and one 30-minute piece.
More so than moving through the academic routine ““ write it, workshop it, possibly put it on a smaller classroom stage ““ the playwriting process is enlightened by flesh-and-blood actors and audience members.
“When you write a play and you share it with your classmates and pass it around the table, it is a lot different than putting it in front of a live audience with live actors,” said second-year graduate playwriting student Michael Vukadinovich, whose play “The Magician and the Memory” is one of the 10-minute “Random Acts.” “You write a play to have it performed and to have it produced, to have it go through the rehearsal process and work with the actors.”
The short plays joined the repertory to give all 21 graduate acting students a chance on stage. “Small Pair” only offers nine parts, and the rest of the actors rotate among the other parts.
At the Little Theater, the student playwright gets a grander facility, more legitimacy and most of all, actual people.
“Playwrights need to see their stuff on stage,” said theater Professor Gary Gardner. Many theater students describe Gardner as a huge student advocate, constantly rallying to see student plays on stage.
The fall New Plays Festival draws the biggest crowd for graduate playwriting, but it is still in Macgowan’s smaller theaters, performed by undergraduates.
“Playwrights need to hear what they did right and wrong from an audience,” he said. “I want our audience to be a part of the development of our playwrights.”
To get graduate student work on the main stage for this season, he pushed the plays himself, and directing one full-length and six short plays is no easy task. The last student-written play to run in the Little Theater was in 2000.
Kit Steinkellner was excited to hear that her play “Small Pair” would be one of the first student-written works at Macgowan Little Theater in nearly a decade. The first-year graduate screenwriting student was eating lunch in Ackerman Union when she got the call.
“When I found out, I just flipped,” Steinkellner said. “When I got to my class, I could barely sit in my seat.”
“Small Pair” revamps the ancient Greek myth of Icarus and his father Daedalus.
In typical Greek myth fashion, Icarus gives in to a fatal flaw ““ in this case, overeagerness in the face of sublime freedom ““ and comes crashing down after flying toward the sun, a trail of melted feathers behind him.
And in typical postmodern theater fashion, Steinkellner’s version offers a retooling of the myth that spins between silly and somber. She turns a two-man story into an ensemble piece, with a domineering lieutenant, a love affair between two morally distressed prison guards and another love story between the 17-year-old Icarus and the 4.5-billion-year-old sun goddess Helia, not to mention three appearances of puppets and a three-person Greek chorus.
“It’s a challenge because it’s based on a Greek myth, but it’s purely absurd,” said second-year graduate acting student Brian Ruppenkamp, who plays Icarus for all his teenage huffing and Herculean heart.
The play takes a witty look at heavy themes. The audience must navigate the piece’s ambiguities, such as history’s unavoidable errors and omissions. Steinkellner says Guantanamo Bay was a huge inspiration, drawing on questions of whether some prisoners deserve to be locked up and the justifications for doing so throughout the work.
Moral high ground remains a slippery pedestal, and as for the question of who is the villain, the answer remains complicated: no one and everyone.
With all the legend-bending and knowledge-questioning, can we call this work a “deconstruction” of the Icarus myth? Or even a “revisionist” take?
“Oh, but I hate those words,” Gardner said. “I like to call it a “˜whimsical drama.'”
