This summer, the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre hosted its second annual summer play series, which included Paul Grellong's '01 "Power of Sail," Alice Tuan's MFA '97 "Iggy Woo" and Stephen Karam's '02 "Speech and Debate." The pieces showcased Brown and Brown/Trinity Consortium students and alums in acting and production capacities.
With the variety of styles, interests and talents featured in the 2006 summer season, festival director and Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance Lowry Marshall aimed to attract atypical theatergoers to professional shows. "What I'm interested in is the development of new work for the American theater and the opportunity to nurture and encourage really gifted people," Marshall said. "These writers are not run of the mill."
"Power of Sail," directed by Alexander Torra GS and penned by "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" writer Grellong, featured the summer season's largest cast.
The play traces the experiences of Charles Lynden, a college professor with fading professional clout who "works towards getting an interview with a famous Holocaust denier for a new book," Torra said. The sequence of events eventually exposes Lynden as a liar, and those around him begin to appear as they truly are, or "what's at the core, what people are driven by," Torra said.
What makes "Power of Sail" unique, however, is its unorthodox structure. The play's eight scenes are numbered chronologically but presented in a completely different order: scenes 1, 3, 5 and 7 comprise Act I, and scenes 8, 6, 4 and 2 fall in Act II. As a result, the first act highlights certain elements before others in preparation for the second act, which reveals various characters' motivations. To rehearse, Torra's seven actors, all alums of either Brown or the Brown/Trinity Consortium, "actually rehearsed the scenes in (chronological) order, which allowed people to connect their own journey through the end of the play," Torra said. "You just have to pay attention to what the playwright is doing."
Alice Tuan's "Iggy Woo" provided a strong counter to the realism and unusual arrangement of "Power of Sail." In director Birgitta Victorson's GS staging of this sometimes-abstract comedy, actress Tina Chilip MFA'06 plays Kiki Wong, a Macy's employee on a quest to quit smoking. Along the way, she meets Iggy Woo (Jason Hart GS), an awkwardly charming nerd, and Benecetio Walsh (Abraham Smith '04), who may or may not be a figment of Kiki's imagination. Tuan, who studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Professor of English Paula Vogel while at Brown, brings a script filled with witty quips and a handful of references to the band No Doubt.
Assistant director Anne Troup '07 said the first act "is very realistic and progressively ... the framework gets more and more absurd." By the production's end, the symbolic and abstract moments begin to dominate the concrete ones; at one point Kiki becomes convinced that Walsh is a clone sent by the tobacco industry to keep her smoking. In all, "Iggy Woo" provided laughs, romance and original takes on obsession, addiction and desire.
"Speech & Debate" was directed by Marshall and penned by Karam. While at Brown, Karam wrote an original musical titled "Emma" that was staged by Brownbrokers - which puts on full-scale written musicals on campus each year - and later performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
"Speech & Debate" played to a series of sold-out houses during its summer run, and has since been featured in a reading at New York's Second Stage Theater.
In "Speech & Debate," three misfits form a club as a ploy to use rhetorical devices and their school's funding to expose a teacher they suspect of being an online predator. Inspired by a real-life homophobic, conservative mayor found to be a pedophile, the play focuses largely on the students and their efforts against an institution, which they believe has stifled discussion on supposedly controversial topics. Though the piece is a play, it incorporates music extensively; Lucy DeVito's '05 character maintains a blog with streaming audio, for instance.
Marshall said the piece is non-judgmental "asks a lot of questions about how we think and the conclusions that we draw about people. It doesn't allow us to get all comfy and self righteous about it."
