Blood and potato slide down the wall, a mother cries over her baby and the father looks triumphantly down at the vegetable's fragments.
This scene is the final, climactic scene from the play "TOT! An Ontological Slugfest," written by Ian McDonald GS and directed by Christopher Windom GS, MFA students in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.
The play, performed Sunday in the McCormack Family Theater at 70 Brown St., is one of eight plays being shown as part of Brown's Writing is Live Festival.
The festival consists of plays written by eight graduate students — seven from the playwriting program and one from the acting program, said Chris Tyler '10, the festival's associate producer.
This showcase, which started Feb. 5 and will continue next weekend, gives graduate students a chance to "work on whatever they want," Tyler said, "and develop what they're working on."
This weekend, the program displayed showings of four works-in-progress. These plays are not complete in the traditional sense, but give playwrights an opportunity to "see what happens," view their work on stage and gauge the audience's reactions, Tyler said. It also allows the writers, audiences, actors, crew and faculty to experience "performance as a kind of dialogue," he added.
The showcase, formerly called the New Plays Festival, was renamed "Writing is Live" to emphasize that writing is a "dynamic entity" that continues to change and is "always evolving," Tyler said. Erik Ehn, the new head of the playwriting program, changed the name of the festival in order to put a greater focus on "writing as an organism itself," Tyler added.
Ehn's "philosophy of playwriting is open to experimentation and risk," said Tyler. "The sky's sort of the limit."
This process of "constant revising and rewriting," he said, is "meant to be wild and unhinged."
"TOT! An Ontological Slugfest" certainly had its "wild and unhinged" moments.
In it, a mother looks down and sees her little baby girl, and a father looks and sees nothing but a potato. The play follows the mother, played by Amanda Weir, and the father, played by Robert Haflinger, as their different perceptions of their child tear the family apart.
The script leads the audience to side with the father when the blanket is pulled aside and in the mother's arms only a potato is seen. The goal was to have the audience committed to the idea that it was a potato, said McDonald, to give the audience only one perception.
The ending throws all preconceived notions aside, though, when the father throws the potato against the wall, and on the wall is not only potato, but also blood.
The play was meant to end with "a question mark," McDonald said. Its goal was to have "the audience thinking one thing" until the end and then changing it, he added.
Inspiration for the play came from a friend's relationship that ended because of fundamentally different views on life, as well McDonald's strong interest in moral relativism and the idea of two alternate realities existing at once, he said.
Overall, the play was an intellectually challenging experience for the audience. Combining comedy, drama, action and vegetable cruelty would be a challenge for any writer, but McDonald was able to put it all together seamlessly.
The plays to be shown this Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Pell Chafee Performance Center at 87 Empire St. are workshop thesis productions, "full productions in the more conventional sense," Tyler said. The thesis productions are more complete and refined and fulfill the more traditional idea of the medium, he said.
Tickets are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Despite the second weekend's more traditional atmosphere, "there's no way to expect what you're going to see," Tyler said.
