Film school festival exhibits innovation

A Chinese American teenager comes of age in 1986, a cast of men in drag takes center stage, and you (yes, you) can play a lead role.

The UCLA theater department’s New Play Festival 2008, which began last Wednesday and runs for the next two weeks, will offer a variety of theater experiences.

According to Edit Villarreal, chair of the Master’s Playwriting program, the New Play Festival got its start more than 10 years ago with the aim of enabling graduate playwriting students to workshop their plays with actors and designers, drawn largely from the undergraduate theater student body, and to present the result in front of an audience.

Featured this season are original works by graduate playwriting students Annette Lee, Jerome Augustus Parker and Adam Simon.

“I’m really excited about all three plays. I think they’re very unusual. They’re very distinctive. They’re very innovative,” said Villarreal.

All performances take place at The Black Box Theater. Reservations are strongly encouraged.

“˜English Only: A Fight for Words in America’

Annette Lee’s “English Only: A Fight for Words in America” is set against the backdrop of California’s statewide push for an official English referendum that won passage in 1986.

Growing up in Monterey Park, a focal point of the movement, Lee had always been aware of the issue.

“Really I think it’s more about change than it is about a different culture. People are not used to seeing change,” she said.

She was curious to explore how the referendum drew support from not only those who were non-Chinese. “What was kind of surprising was seeing a lot of Asian Americans felt the same way … that anybody coming to this country needs to learn English and not be so obtrusive, and become more “˜American,’ so to speak.”

Despite the somber historical aspect, “English Only” is a comedy with a definite fantasy element.

“It centers around a teenager, an Asian American teenager, but it also goes into her mind, so it goes into her fantasies, and how she deals with reality, how she finds the logic in what’s going on in her world.”

“English Only” concluded its run last Friday with performances preceded by Simon’s one-act “Annual Conference” but will be reprised at the New Los Angeles Theater Center Dec. 5 through 7, when all three plays are presented simultaneously in separate spaces.

“˜The House of Dinah or The Black Queens’

Written by Jerome Augustus Parker, the play opens on Wednesday and tells the story of a waitress and another woman in the restaurant, both of whom become enslaved under the three managers there.

All the roles are played by black men in drag. Parker, who comes from a costume background at Juilliard, became familiar with the drag culture while working on and off Broadway.

“I think if you ask each one of (the characters), they would tell you that they were all female. Whether that means they’re transvestites, drag queens, transsexuals, just in touch with their feminine side … I want (the cast) to explore that in this play.”

“Dinah” of the title is Dinah Washington, whose voice Parker credits to have largely inspired the story.

“She’s the forerunner of like a Mary J. Blige, of a Beyoncé,” he said. “She has that diva quality, and especially for African Americans back in the ’30s, when she started recording, she was that voice for these African American men.”

He hopes audience members will emerge from the play with a new perspective on slavery.

“The other side of it, meaning, what goodness, what good comes out of being enslaved,” he said. “And I think from a black perspective, I think that’s something that we’re still trying to figure out, you know. Four hundred years of slavery, how do we move past all that pain that we’ve been through?”

“˜Lot Sand Found’

Running next Wednesday through Friday is Adam Simon’s “Lot Sand Found”. A play on the words “lost and found,” it is less a play than a combination of installation art, pre-recorded audio and live performance ““ yours, that is.

Every two minutes, an audience member will enter the space, equipped with headphones and an iPod containing, in random order, 20 tracks that will guide its listener to navigate the room and take certain actions, such as reading one letter within a sea of letters scattered on the floor.

Simon calls it a “headphones tour” in shuffle.

“Headphones are like somebody whispering in your ear, basically. Nobody else can hear it. It’s like a secret,” he said.

For Simon, it was important that the piece not be inaccessible or pretentious.

“The themes of this show are completely universal. There’s not a person on this earth who hasn’t dealt with the loss of a memory, the loss of a family member, the loss of a certain time in their life, the loss of a possession, and the subsequent finding of all those things or finding out how to deal with those things.”

Simon believes the essential role technology plays in our lives should be naturally reflected in the theater to make theater more accessible for more people.

“I think that it’s the way we experience the world, going back to the way you walk around campus with headphones on,” he said. “People have a soundtrack to their daily life … If that soundtrack had a narration, if that soundtrack were codified into a single room, into a show, what would that feel like?”