The University of Iowa’s New Play Festival has been around since the debut of the Playwright Workshop in 1971, and it has only grown since. The festival traditionally features four staged works from four graduate playwrights, all directed by graduate students.

The process consists of a few weeks of rehearsal for a show that will be performed and taken down within 48 hours. Typically, graduate students are the only ones allowed into the festival. After a slot opened this year, though, undergrads filled in.

“I had an idea for a full-length comedy script where the resident ghost of a theater meets the ghost who appears when you say the name of Shakespeare’s Scottish play in a theater,” Charlie Schmelzer, a fourth-year playwriting student at the UI, said.

Bridget Dieden, also participating this year, remembers the beginning of the process, where the prompt was two chairs and a light bulb.

“I wrote a scene for that, and I had the whole thing where they were crawling out of chairs, and I was like, ‘Great, got it, that’s out,’” Diedon joked.

The audiences of the productions will see an amalgamation of many different plays, all sewn together by Michael Flores, a graduate choreographer and director. Flores has curated this piece through “devising,” a sort of rehearsed improvisation the university has been seeing a lot recently within “Enemy of the People” and “The Indoctrination of Bananas.”

“I used devising to get the cast and ensemble to understand a vocabulary of movement but also to understand how we, in this collective, in this space, move their bodies and how our bodies and our movement can inform us of what story is,” Flores said.

Flores has been “devising” his whole life, but it was only when he came to the UI and had people put a name on it that he truly understood the process and his directorial style.

“I let the material and content help me generate what the choreographic movement can be because it feels self-indulgent to think of movement just based on one person. I think theater is such a collaborative form, and I want all the bodies in the space to inform me of what this can be because it better serves those bodies,” Flores said.

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Even though all work will be at the festival, “Three Cubes and a Ghost Light” will only run once. This, along with their last-in-line casting pick spot, seemed to give Schmelzer and Diedon a less than hopeful look at the future, regarding whether their works would be allowed back into the festival.

“I would love to say this department appreciates undergrad work, but that would not be true. They had an opening because they didn’t have four graduate playwrights participating in the festival, so they gave the undergrads a chance, especially because we have four graduate directors who want to direct things,” Dieden said. “I am so grateful I get to work with Michael. I think he is a genius.”

Schmelzer has a more hopeful view of the department’s future, shouting out the work Lisa Schlesinger has done running the undergraduate workshop.

“There is always an outcry for more undergraduate work and representation,” Schmelzer said.

This year’s New Play Festival will shake up the traditional format. Theatre-goers can experience “Three Cubes and A Ghost Light” on Tuesday, May 6 at 7 p.m. at the Alan MacVey Theatre in the Theatre Building.

“I hope the audience walks away with a sense of curiosity for what theater can be,” Flores said.