UW students and the community of Laramie have the opportunity to view the works of UW student directors with the Biannual Student Directed One Act event this week, comprised of seven short plays.
The plays are the final projects of four students in the advanced directing course taught by Professor William “Bill” Downs. All seven plays are comedies, or at least have comedic elements—which is perfect for the final stretch of the semester, said Downs.
“I think the audience will have a damn good time,” Downs said. “One of the things you need right before finals start is an evening of fun, and this is it. And how can you get away from this with five bucks, for God’s sakes?”
That five bucks covers the price of admission for about two hours total, with intermission, for all seven plays showing each night this week at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday through Friday, in the Studio Theatre of the Buchanan Center for Performing Arts.
The directors and their plays are: Justen Glover, musical theater and performance major and psychology minor with “Award Winning Entry” and “Funeral Parlor;” Jared Mohr-leiva, theatre and dance major with “The Horns Of A Dilemma” and “A Date With Destiny;” Jeremy Rowley with “George Is Dead;” and Rebecka “Beck” Smith, who recently graduated with a B.F.A. in musical theatre and performance and directed “Step On Me” and “Do It For Francine.”
“We deal with a variety of subjects both serious and silly,” Rowley said. “The title of mine is ‘George Is Dead,’ so I think that immediately puts in a sort of liminal space between comedic and dramatic, or tragic. My intent is for us to see both the light and the dark.”
Directing the plays has required a high level of commitment from each of the student directors so near the end of the semester.
“Theater students are committed,” Downs said. “These poor directors are full-time students—all of them have jobs on top of rehearsing every night. They’re doing a dance piece right now called “Six Songs from Ellis Island” and many of them are involved in that, which means that they don’t start their rehearsals often until after that’s over—so they’re rehearsing at ten and eleven and midnight. That’s the life of a theater major.”
Downs expressed his admiration for the efforts of those theater majors, comparing their workloads today to his own as a student.
“Students today have to go through things that when I was an undergraduate I would never have imagined,” Downs said. “Paying tremendous amounts of money, often they work second jobs, and are going to school full-time and then rehearsing at night. I would have flunked out if I had been a student with the requirements we put on students today.”
The directors have taken that commitment to their work seriously as a means of speaking to their audience and their community.
“I really like to enrich and elevate the community as best I can,” Smith said. “I really try to find pieces that I can have a really relevant message in there that helps spark a conversation, to be able to help our community deal with issues that I think are relevant.”
Proceeds from the three nights of student-directed plays go to benefit other endeavors of theater department students.
“This is really about student directors directing their first plays,” Downs said. “Everything is donated to the actual theater and dance students to help them go to conferences and things like that.”
