When Laura Colella's GS play "Liquorland" hits the stage Friday evening, it will open the third annual Writing Is Live, a free playwriting festival featuring new work by graduate and undergraduate students. Colella and five other student playwrights in the Departments of Theater Arts and Performance Studies and Africana Studies will be premiering their work over the next ten days in Leeds Theatre, Rites and Reason Theatre and the Production Workshop Downspace.
According to a festival press release, Writing Is Live "stresses and plays with the idea of the Live." The plays themselves are still in flux, raw and emerging.
"The audience is crucial," said Vanessa Gilbert, the festival's director and a TAPS lecturer. Several of the workshop plays will include Folkthought discussions after the performances. Theatergoers, Gilbert said, will have "the distinct opportunity to see a play grow."
The festival process begins each year when graduate students are admitted into the Writing for Performance program, Gilbert explained. The writings of the master's students are the seeds that are nurtured throughout the year and become the productions shown at the festival. The students themselves become the festival's curators, she added.
The themes of the plays are as varied as the backgrounds of the playwrights themselves. The playwrights come from Uganda and the Sundance Institute and from backgrounds in art history, radio and acting. They have collaborated on projects such as "‘Bothness and a Play': a google doc." Others include college sophomores and experienced filmmakers.
"Everyone is grappling with what it means to be alive today," Gilbert said. "I think the graduate students are writing into a world they would like to see."
Past playwrights have had their work grow into new things, both expected and unexpected, after the festival ended. Playwright Jackie Sillies Drury will be opening the play she premiered at the Writing Is Live festival two years ago at the Victory Gardens Theatre in New York next month. She has also shown it at the Prelude Festival in New York City.
Two multimedia artists' play that debuted at Writing Is Live bloomed into a short film based on the play. It will be shown at the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts' exhibition in a few days.
"Theater is a collaborative art form," Gilbert said. "The Writing Is Live Festival is one of the only places where graduate students and undergraduate students truly collaborate."
Most importantly, in the joyous and productive environment of Writing Is Live, they can collaborate as peers, she pointed out, because they are equals as workers.
