In a whirl of imaginative performances over a two-week span, the Baldwin New Play Festival is a purely studen
t-run production. The on-campus series features full-length plays and staged readings from students in the MFA Playwriting Program, a synergistic effort of the entire UCSD Theatre and Dance Department.’
During the week leading up to showtime, the student playwrights and directors were caught in a final frenzy of production meetings and rehearsals. They come from all disciplines ‘mdash; from neuroscience to engineering and classical singing ‘mdash; but what unites them is a mutual appreciation for the visceral gusto of live theater. As ‘Clementine’ playwright Krista Knight puts it: ‘When something is cool onstage it hits you in the gut. I don’t get that very often when I go to the movies. I don’t get that very often when I go to the theater, but when I do? Man. When it’s good, it’s good.’
‘Picked’ Directed by Lori Petermann Written by Stephanie Timm
The story of a magical land racked by wartime horrors, ‘Picked will be performed live at the Mandeville Weiss Forum Theater on April 15, 18, 21, 22 and 23 at 8 p.m.
‘Refraction’ Directed by Jeff Wienckowski Written by Ronald McCants
Along way from ‘Trollmole,’ the 20-pager he wrote in first grade, engineering major Ronald McCants’ ‘Refraction’ unravels the more serious yarns of sexuality and racial relations.’
The tale begins after the death of a homosexual black youth at the hands of Rico, a Latino teenager. Compelled to reveal Rico’s murderous motives, a counselor at the Texas Youth Commission tries drawing it out of him with therapy, and in this grueling process, uncovers the besmirched past and violence of his own family.’
‘I tried to be inspired by what is American, what is ours,’ McCants said, gesturing charismatically. ‘And I think what is ours is our family structures, our way of life, and our communities ‘mdash; which are extensions of our families.”
His own family history, in fact, provided him with a scaffold of inspiration, both for the new play and his playwriting career from the get-go. ‘My focus is storytelling,’ he said. ‘I grew up in a household where that’s what we’d do ‘mdash; tell stories all the time.”
McCants also infuses a passion for engineering into his theatrics. Amid producing children’s television shows, teaching at high schools and interning, he maintains an engineer’s mechanistic outlook: ‘I love technology, and I’m trying to bridge a gap between technology and storytelling,’ he said. One of his many pastimes, working on his Web site Bettyit.com, explores the Internet as a storytelling vehicle. ‘ Still, McCants finds that the power to ‘milk a metaphor’ can’t be found outside the theater. ‘I see it best as a place for healing, a place to observe things like a scientist. … If the theater was just for theater people, then what good would it be?”
‘Refraction’ will be performed live at the Mandell Weiss Forum Studio on April 16, 17, 22, 23 and 24 at 8 p.m.
‘Obscura’ Directed by Tom Dugdale Written by Jennifer Barclay
Her espresso’s getting cold. But the everyday scattering of cigarette butts and chatter of passersby have always been enough to fuel Jennifer Barclay.
‘Obscura,’ the grad student’s latest play, channels transatlantic voyeurism ‘mdash; the stuff of indulgent Parisian cafe-goers ‘mdash; into a poetic and unlikely romance between two neighbors sharing an insomniac apartment building. Sure, the quaint of cobblestone pavements along the Champs-Elys’eacute;es soon yield to the uncomfortable grubbiness of everyday life, but Barclay’s enchanting fairytale retains the dreaminess of a land far, far away.
‘I’ve lived in a lot of apartments,’ Barclay said, resting her head in her palm. ‘And I was very fascinated by the duplicity between how intimate it is and how alien it is to live smack up right next to somebody.’ In fact, just the other night, a neighbor’s food scraps funneled up through her sink.
It’s within the collaboration and artistic vision of director Tom Dugdale that ‘Obscura” will rightly project itself onto the set, as a voyeuristic consciousness of less than polite personal habits.
During dress rehearsal, actors parade onto the stage through the aisles ‘mdash; the distance between makeshift apartment and audience instantly vanishing ‘mdash; while natural lighting dispenses the room.The play is a three-ring circus, challenging our ability to follow multiple events as they unfold simultaneously.
‘It’s like watching four different televisions at once,’ Dugdale explained. ‘We see all the apartments all the time. There are no blackouts. Everything continues.’
Barclay said she was inspired to become a playwright after experiencing the ‘complete transportation’ and suspension of disbelief that theatrical performance can provide its audience. ‘Where you come out of a play, and you feel your head is just spinning and you’re just reeling, and you feel like you’ve been to a completely different universe,’ she said, ‘and you somehow, even if it’s in an inarticulate way, feel like you’ve been changed.”
‘Obscura’ will be performed live at the Mandell Weiss Forum Theater on April 17, 18, 24 and 25 at 8 p.m.
‘Clementine and the Cyber Ducks’ Directed by Adam Arian Written by Krista Knight
Krista Knight is never short of words ‘mdash; they adorn her hands like temporary tattoos, decorate her fridge and animate the to-do list of her personalized Google start page.
‘It’s like I’m expecting to be called up for script duty at any minute and need to be armed with play ideas at the ready,’ Knight says.
In a testament to her fascination with language, ‘Clementine and the Cyber Ducks’ dabbles with the lyrics of its namesake. Revamping the practically canonized western folk ballad, ‘Clementine’ welds the mid-1800s gold rush with 1990s Silicon Valley. But despite its dark examination of the American frontier’s transformation, the play maintains a buoyant spirit ‘mdash; in the frivolity of its bar fights, loose women and steam-punk chorus of deviant ducks.
Main character Brian, a young computer programmer, opens the play with a recount of last night’s bar-scapade: He met a girl, Clementine ‘mdash; straight from 1849. With her crippled father in tow, Clementine has traveled out west to strike it rich, only to discover it a contemporary dot-com bubble. The ensuing romance between Brian and Clementine careens into a modern day, get-rich-quick scheme: to start up an Internet search engine. But to fund the operation, Clementine and Brian get into the bad habit of wrenching money from the helpless geezer.’
In this vaudevillian Greek tragedy, the juxtaposition of time periods hints more profoundly at the similarities that interested its playwright from the start.
‘The song ‘Clementine’ has always struck me because of the disparity between this upbeat melody and the song’s internal narrative about this girl’s drowning,’ Knight said.
And it’s this kind of unexpected cohesion that defines Krista’s playwriting career. As an undergraduate at Brown University, she studied neuroscience, motivated by the ‘precise ways of describing the known world.’ When asked about leaping across disciplines, she says, with the sophistication of a well-versed playwright, ‘What drew me to playwriting was the opportunity to use those same parameters, to create unique worlds. Every time I create a play, I create a world.’
‘Clementine and the Cyber Ducks’ will be performed live at the Arthur Wagner Theater on April 17, 18, 24 and 25 at 8 p.m.