By Gracey Murphy
New plays, fresh actors, and a whole lot of drama can only mean it’s time for the theater event of the year: the Iowa New Play Festival.
Each year, during the last week of school, the Theater Department puts on a week full of new plays worked on by students. This year, today through Wednesday, the will have two full productions, squeeze: A Motel Play today and Cut & Run on Tuesday. Additionally, there will be a reading given daily: Packing, Quiz Out, and Household or Must be a Duck.
“We don’t have time to think, so you don’t have time to doubt yourself, you don’t have time to get all in your head.,” said Ariel Francouer, the director of squeeze. “We have to put this up, we have to help other people do their jobs, and it becomes very selfless. I think it’s representative of what theater is. Theater is so ephemeral. You enter the show as an audience member, and that specific show will never happen again.”
This is Francouer’s third time directing a play for the festival, but it is playwright Theresa Giacopasi’s first show in the event. She enjoyed that she was able to work with a variety of people, she said. With the production, she gets to work with set designers, costume designers, and many others. She’s had readings in the past, but never one of the full-scale productions.
The play is about four very distinct women who go to a motel, ultimately becoming trapped there.
“I stay in too many bad motel rooms,” Giacopasi said. “I’m one of those people that get in at 11 p.m. and leaves at 7 a.m., but there is a different kind of person who stays in a motel for a very long period of time. It’s a very masculine space, so I started thinking about where the women stay here.”
She also drew inspiration from programs that host international students as interns, she said. They might say that the student will be in NYC, when actually they’re working at a motel an hour outside of it with no means of transportation. They’re isolated all summer, with no one other than the people who check in.
The other play, Cut & Run, will be performed on Tuesday. The playwright, Eric Micha Holmes, created this play after living in NYC for an extended amount of time. He was a concierge at a hotel and was introduced to many strata of society, he said. He could be on the phone speaking with a C-list celeb requesting drugs while also watching a taxi driver’s car.
While there, he came across an article about Rabia Sarwar, a woman from Pakistan who married an American-Pakistani man. She didn’t appreciate his neglect toward Islamic values, so she tried to slit his throat while he slept.
“From the moment I read it, for some bizarre reason, I understood her,” Holmes said. “Living in New York City, she became this character through whom I could vent my own frustrations about living there.”
For Sydney Alexander (Gretchen/Vixie in Cut & Run) this will be her first time participating in the festival.
“My biggest goal is keeping my energy up,” Alexander said. “It’s only one day, so we only have one shot. I’ve never worked with such a small cast. I’ve loved getting a cohesive bond among people I work with.”
For the New Play Festival, these shows are just the beginning; the festival will continue through Friday.
“People should come because it’s nice to come to the West Side of the river for something besides football or going to the hospital,” Holmes said.
Be sure to check back on Thursday for information about the New Play Festival’s weekend productions.