“I once heard a playwright explain ideas and story-making like marriage. It’s nice and beautiful and fresh when you’re in the first couple years, or months in the honeymoon phase. But, whether or not it will last, it takes cleaning out the bathroom, doing the fine-tuning, and editing of the play,” Sara Alvidrez, a third-year student at the University of Iowa, said. “If it survives that, then it’s going to last.”
The end of February marked the UI’s annual Ten Minute Play Festival. This three-day-long event featured readings and staged plays from undergraduate students brave enough to submit 10-minute-long pieces of theater. The topics this year ranged from a retelling of Adam and Eve and their Garden of Eden to a housewife planning to kill her abusive husband.
Nestled between these large genres of works was Alvidrez, who had two pieces featured in this year’s festival. The first, “Beers and Queers,” is a tale of sapphic love in the ’50s. “I Hate You Kyle Busch,” her second piece, is a heartwarming examination of grief and the sweet friendship between the oddest characters.
“For ‘I Hate You Kyle Busch’ I just thought it would be nice to talk about grief funnily,” Alvidrez said. “I wanted to bring more humanity to the weird girl that has mismatched clothes and is kind of mean, or the janitor that is nice and people take for granted. People can bond in the weirdest of places, and knowing you’re not alone is important.”
This is not Alvidrez’s first time writing for the university, nor is it her first time putting on another hat besides the usual acting cap she frequents.
Her writing has previously been a part of the Ten Minute Play Festival, and she has directed many a piece for the UI.
“Everything depends on where my heart takes me. Don’t do something if you don’t feel called to do it,” Alvidrez said.
Between last year’s Ten Minute Play Festival and now, Alvidrez spent five months studying abroad and didn’t write a single page of theater the whole time. When she returned to Iowa, she was motivated to further explore her artistic perspective.
“Initially I thought I was only an actor coming into my theater major, but now that I have directed, I realized the way my perspective and my brain works for comprehending theater is more of a directorial perspective,” Alvidrez said.
Alvidrez talked highly about the UI and the friends she made along the way influencing her evolution as a writer and director. The university and the community she built during her journey through the department helped her write and finalize her scripts for the Ten Minute Play Festival.
“Watching Sara grow as a director and writer has been incredible. Since we met my freshman year, she has been so determined to hone her skills and become the best artist she can be,” third-year student Maddie Rodriguez said. “She is full of talent and kindness and seeing her acknowledge her own abilities is truly beautiful.”
From creating the script in her third year of a playwriting class to sitting down with her friends and hashing out the details of the piece, Alvidrez used the university community as a tool to create art that would inspire others. This helped her build her philosophies around writing while getting more and more experience in the field.
“I think and brainstorm of different moments at the pinnacle of plot and character. I am of the group that the play tells you what it wants to be. Once you allow it to, the more you write it, the more the characters will become themselves, and the more you talk to them and think about them as real people in the context of which they’re living. That helps it prosper,” Alvidrez said.