Budding playwrights saw their works performed at the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin One-Act Festival last Saturday in Wish Theater.
The competition, one of Bowdoin’s smaller scale theater projects, is a 79 year-old Masque and Gown tradition. Prior to the inter-college event, Bowdoin holds its own Student Written One-Act Festival, which gives aspiring student playwrights the opportunity to submit original work to be edited and performed.
Masque and Gown selected and produced four original works from the submission pool. The acts were showcased last Friday night, and the audience voted for the best submission.
The winning playwright, Callie Ferguson ’15, received the highly coveted Hunter S. Frost ’47 Award and her act, “Empty Nest,” was performed again on Saturday as part of the Colby-Bowdoin-Bates Festival.
“We got a very competitive selection,” said Masque and Gown President and One-Acts Festival co-producer Patrick Lavallee ’13.
“It was really great because people who directed and helped on tech and acted, are not the normal regulars of the theater,” said Co-Producer Sasha Davis ’13. “There were a lot of new people that got involved and a lot of underclassmen, so I thought it was really great in terms of opening the community of theater at Bowdoin for students who aren’t otherwise really involved in it.”
“The one-acts are one of Masque and Gown’s most accessible productions,” said Lavallee. “It offers the entire theater experience in a much lower commitment. It’s a different audience experience and it comes in contrast with most of our major productions.”
In an e-mail to the Orient, Ferguson elaborated upon the concepts behind “Empty Nest.”
“The plot centers around characters (Barb and Danny, in particular) who are entering a new phase in their life and are forced to consider and evaluate their identities,” wrote Ferguson. “These considerations also take place in a wider context of race and homosexuality—a context which provides some of the humor and political incorrectness—but if the play is a success, these ‘hot button topics’ are ultimately subordinated to the characters themselves, who are relatively unimportant in the scheme of things. That is to say, I think that everyone has the potential to be worthy of attention if it stands to show us something interesting.
“I think that’s especially relevant to Bowdoin students, who are all in the process of figuring themselves out and weighing themselves against the scheme of this,” she wrote.
Other plays that took the Wish Theater stage as a part of Friday’s performance were “Sunrise” by Sam Fichtner ’14, “Blueberry Pie” by Chloe Huang ’13, and “How Was Your Break?” by Marisa McGarry ’14.
“In past years, it’s sort of fallen by the wayside, but this year I wanted to take the change to sort of revive it because it is something that has a lot of potential,” said Lavallee, in reference to the Bowdoin competition.
“It used to be done a lot and it was a relationship that was established between the colleges but because people have very different academic calendars and our clubs do different things, our schedules didn’t line up,” he said. “So this year, I started planning this back in September, and it turns out that there was exactly one weekend in the whole year that overlapped.”
As a way to forge community among the playwrights, actors and directors, Masque & Gown also planned a stage combat workshop with stage combat choreographer Rob Najarian ’99 of Boston University.
“In athletics, different sports teams play each other and in academics, different students research the same thing and go to conferences, but theater—theater’s all about community, so it kind of makes sense that you would do a shared event with other colleges,” said Davis. “Bowdoin is small, Colby and Bates are small, so it was great to get to know the theater communities at other schools.”