Four different shows, four different writers, a new play each night.
This week the local group Relative Theatrics will be performing their Playwrights Voiced festival that will feature four different plays over the course of four nights. The plays were picked out of 66 submissions by Anne Mason, an alumnus from UW who graduated from the theatre and dance department and founded Relative Theatrics.
“I plan all of the programing, and assemble the artists, and really make it happen,” Mason said.
Relative Theatrics is open to anyone and everyone in the community, no matter their background in acting or their experience in playwrighting. The Playwrights Voiced event is in its third year in action while the rest of Relative Theatrics’ events are in their fourth year.
“A lot of theatre companies will do something like this where they have an event or a festival of readings of new plays out of an effort to assist in the development process of new works,” Mason said.
The plays will take place in the Gryphon Theatre on May 3 – 6 at 7:30 p.m. Mason creates a very intimate setting to provide entertainment for the audience as well as a great sounding board for playwrights as they continue to work on their works before publication.
“These are staged readings so you don’t have to memorize,” Mason said. “It’s really about bringing the words off of the page and giving the text an embodiment for the first time for these playwrights.”
The plays that are being performed this week are “Wrong Place, Right Time” by Stacey Ann Tilton; “Wanda, Daisy, & the Great Rapture” by Alexis Schaetzle; “The Big Heartless” by Dale Dunn; and “Pied Noir” by Felice Locker.
“I’ve always loved to write but this is the first play that I’ve really spent time on,” Tilton said.
Tilton is a sophomore at UW studying art education and theatre. Her play centers around a character named Todd who discovers he has been sent the wrong package in the mail and the trouble that follows soon after his discovery of it.
“I like extreme things, I like to see people pushed to the brink of what they will do because the majority of us regular citizens will never be put in the situation that Todd is,” Tilton said. “I would like the audience to experience something that they will never get to in the normal world.”
Tilton has been fortunate as a new playwright to watch the director Landee Lockhart and actors rehearse the play and she looks forward to seeing the others performed. Another UW participant of the event is Peter Parolin, an English professor and department chair.
“Mine is in Pied Noir, which is the French expression literally meaning ‘black foot’ which is a name that the French gave to French Algerians,” Parolin said. “It’s a really intense play about the impact of French colonization in Algeria even years after that colonization ended.”
Parolin added that it is one of the more intense plays in the series and explores racism, domination, exploitation and it grapples with people’s struggles to come to terms with those they see as different. He has been working with Relative Theatrics for a couple years now as an actor and enjoys it every time.
“It [Relative Theatrics] enriches cultural life of Laramie and I think for students it’s fabulous that even in a small town like Laramie we have and inventive, risky, stimulating, independent theatre company like Relative Theatrics,” Parolin said.
Each show will be followed by a discussion where audience members will be able to share their views and ask questions to the playwright, director and actors.
