The 21st annual Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights’ Festival is back with two full productions of graduate playwrights’ work, six staged readings and three mentors ready to give feedback.
To anyone who doesn’t know about the Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights’ Festival, Charles Smith has one particular reason to see the new plays featured in the festival.
“You’ll likely see the first public presentation of a play that will be professionally produced a couple of years from now,” Smith, head of the Professional Playwriting Program, said. “I always find that delightful … The plays go on to have lives outside of (Ohio University).”
It is the 21st year of the festival, which features work from all eight graduate playwrights in the MFA program. Two third-year graduate students have full productions of their plays, and all of the other plays are staged readings.
Jeffry Chastang’s Dauphin Island kicks off the festival Wednesday and follows the story of Selwyn Tate as he is en route to a new job on Dauphin Island and ends up interrupting the self-imposed isolation of Kendra in her dogtrot house- or two homes that have a breezeway in between them but are all connected under one roof.
Chastang’s family served as some of the inspiration for many elements of the play, he said. For instance, his great grandpa’s house was a dogtrot, an image he recalled while writing the play. The characters, who Chastang describes as two lost souls, have even closer ties to the third-year graduate playwright.
“Selwyn is like a composite of guys I grew up with,” Chastang said. “Bits of (playwrights’) personalities are in each character, no matter the sex. A lot of me is like Selwyn and a lot of me is like Kendra … There’s different socioeconomic backgrounds in my family … I wanted to spotlight that, too.”
Neal Adelman’s Only Good Things Happen at the Fair is the other full production and can be described in a few words: the inheritance of masculinity and poorly taxidermied animals. In the play, Jason Murdock struggles to figure out what it means to be a man while his father, the sheriff, is present while also battling what it means to be a good, or bad, person.
“I’ve always been very interested in masculinity and the way it’s defined, specifically within family units,” Adelman, a third-year graduate playwright, said. “I’ve always been interested in taxidermy … After you kill this thing, you try to get it to look like it hasn’t been killed … It’s full of contradictions for me.”
In addition to the full productions, Smith pointed out his “very strong” first-year class consisting of Catherine Weingarten and Rachel Bykowski due to the nature of their plays.
“Both have written really different plays that both address feminism, women, body imagery and women’s role in the U.S. and this culture in radically different ways, so I find that to be very exciting,” Smith said.
Each year for the festival, Smith brings in three professionals to provide feedback for all of the plays. This year’s mentors are Michael Legg, director of the Apprentice/Intern Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville; Aaron Carter, literary manager at Steppenwolf Theatre Company; and Janet Allen, executive artistic director of Indiana Repertory Theater.
“We try to bring guests who maybe have some kind of connection to the work being done,” Smith said. “Steppenwolf believes in hard realism and the two third-year plays are fairly realistic. Neal’s play is this kind of real working class theater that Steppenwolf is known for.”
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