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Each year, the undergraduate and graduate playwrights’ festivals produce and highlight student work to the Athens and Ohio University audiences. Thanks to TAGS, or the Theater Association for Graduate Students, an additional outlet has been added to the lineup for showcasing student-written plays.
TAGS is producing the New Play Project in which two graduate students’ plays will be performed. Both shows will have two performances at Central Venue, 29 E. Carpenter St.
Playing Wednesday and Friday, Cakes by Abraham Adams discusses addiction and follows a man with a secret and how he and his loved ones deal with this secret.
“Ultimately, what I hope people come away with is we all have things we’re dealing with on the inside, and that’s OK,” Adams, a third-year graduate actor, said. “It’s OK to be flawed.”
At first, Adams said he thought TAGS was joking about selecting his play, but then felt very flattered as Cakes is his first attempt at writing a full-length play.
“I think my taste in playwriting is more toward the non-realistic,” he said. “I enjoy making people uncomfortable, in a healthy way … (and making the audience) question what’s going on.”
Fools’ Gold by Morgan Patton, which will be performed on Thursday and Saturday, is the third-year graduate playwright’s thesis play, which will be truly completed in the Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights’ Festival on April 23. The play is a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, though instead of being set in a religious context, it focuses on the socio-economic divide.
Fools’ Gold will only have a staged reading in the Seabury Quinn festival, thus the TAGS show will allow Patton to see her play with more produced design elements.
“(It’s invaluable) to have the actors and director really invested and bringing life to the words again,” Patton said. “You really can’t get (that) … through basic workshop readings because those maybe get one rehearsal so you hear (the play) twice, and the actors don’t get time to embody the role."
Those planning on attending the New Play Project and the Seabury Quinn festival, Patton said, won’t see the same show. Due to actor availability, Patton rewrote one of the roles to be female. However, the role will return to being male in the Seabury Quinn festival.
Changing the character to a woman, Patton said, helped her fix the problems she had with the original. Those fixes will be transferred into the final draft but adapted to fit the once-again male character.
The New Play Project is an independent production by TAGS, and Elliot Dodd, the production manager for the mini-festival, said he has been very impressed by the extent of everyone’s input.
“It’s been a labor of love on (the) part of the actors (and) directors,” Dodd, a first-year graduate student studying production management, said. “It’s just TAGS working with a condensed schedule and small budget to get really creative.”
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