Through this year’s annual “Writing is Live” festival, students in Brown masters of fine arts playwriting program debuted six original “plays in progress,” featuring everything from a sleep-inducing virus to fraternity hazing.
The festival — which was hosted by the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies — featured an in-progress format that allowed the playwrights to give notes, tweak their scripts and experiment with their shows all while being surrounded by peers, teachers and community members.
Although the five-day festival came to a close on Sunday, playwright Dhari Noel GS said that there will likely be many more drafts of the shows before they are finalized, noting this festival isn’t the “final step in the play’s life.”
While the festival offers students the chance to experiment with their shows in front of a live audience, some students noted that the experience was still accompanied with nerves and pressure.
Kathy Ng ’17 GS described the anxiety that comes with moving her written work from a thesis workshop to the stage. For Ng, this feeling is both “torturous and pleasurable” and makes playwriting “a unique genre of writing.”
Leading up to the festival, Jimmy Fay GS changed their play “about 600 times” but was excited to see how it would play out on the stage. Fay’s show, titled “Straight Wedding,” follows two young straight people’s attempt to marry in a world where queerness is the norm.
Fay discussed how the play’s theme of a wedding arose from their own obsessions with the celebration, as well as the respective grief they felt while watching that fantasy “crumble before their eyes” as they navigated their own queer and transgender identity.
“What if straight people had to experience that (grief) too?” Fay asked in an interview with The Herald.
Noel’s play “Is Cry You Cry’n?” which also serves as his thesis production, follows two separate storylines: a Caribbean family’s wedding and a fraternity celebrating their last night of a hazing-filled “hell week.”
Notably, both events take place in the same basement but many years apart.
After receiving their TAPS undergraduate degree from Brown in 2017, Ng returned to campus in pursuit of a playwriting MFA after getting “bit by the (playwriting) bug,” she told The Herald. Ng’s speculative feature play, “Kingdom,” imagines a world where children fall asleep in a mysterious pandemic.
Ng said their time in the MFA program has been “transformative” and filled with “life-changing classes.”
Noel expressed a similar sentiment, noting that throughout the program, they have “completely transformed — as a writer, as a person and as an artist.”
Although the program is small, the playwrights said they are able to experiment with and nourish their craft while learning from the equally passionate writers alongside them.
“In this room, it’s the best writers I’ll ever meet,” Noel said. “We can really trust each other.”
