Courtesy Photo
Emily Howell, a first-year journalism major from Portland, plays Rhiannon, and Ian Hanley, a senior theater arts major also from Portland, takes on the role of Tony in ‘Leaving Shallot,’ showing at Arena Theatre as
In early February of this year, University student Alexander Pawlowski spent two school nights in a row wide awake. During this time, the theater arts major from Eugene was writing and revising a play.
Pawlowski said his “Leaving Shallot” is a modern romantic tale of two lost souls coming together for one night. And it’s one of two plays presented in the University Theatre’s second annual “New Voices” playwriting series.
The pair of new student-written plays begins Nov. 15 and runs Nov. 16 and 17. Performances of “Leaving Shallot” and the other play, “Peephole,” will be held in the Arena Theatre in Villard Hall, 1109 Old Campus Ln., starting at 8 p.m. Both plays have been selected for submission to the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival new play competition.
“Peephole” was composed by theater arts alumnus Ian Appel, who graduated in 2001 and currently teaches English at Oregon State University.
“Both plays are exceptional works for young writers,” said director Craig Willis, a doctoral candidate in the theater arts department. “Playwriting is perhaps the most difficult task in theater, and I think it’s incredibly exciting to hear the voices of our own students on the stage.”
Appel said he considers “Peephole” to be the first full-length one-act play he has written, and part of his path to finding his “sea legs” in playwriting. He encouraged people to attend because he said the script is relevant to how the media today fabricates images. The play, which he described as short and chaotic, is a serio-comic consideration of society’s ability to be driven to insane acts by overactive media, and also questions contemporary spiritual fulfillment.
He said the play focuses on an end-of-the-world scenario, where the “media rules the roost, and everyone feeds off television.”
“It’s been fun getting into these characters’ minds and figuring out how they’d react to each other,” Appel said.
He added that he would like his play to make a lasting impression on the audience.
“What I’d hope resonates is a sense of both the comic absurdity and human tragedy of our media-saturated pop culture, how that affects our relationships with other people and how our relationships with other people can transcend that sensibility,” Appel said.
Lauren Armstrong, a senior theater arts major who plays Dana in “Peephole,” said she enjoys the challenges of her part. Armstrong said she idolizes her character because Dana questions everything she is told and can remain perfectly calm in the face of danger and death. She described the play as the story of “a yuppie couple, Dana and Gerard, residing in a large city during the Apocalypse.”
“(Dana’s) driving force — her reason for living at this point in her life — is not her material possessions, her place in a capitalist society or a belief in a divine entity, but her love for Gerard,” Armstrong said.
Willis said the playwrights, student actors, designers and crew members have all made valuable contributions to the plays while defining their talents. But he also said the two plays are very different from each other.
“‘Peephole’ is slightly absurdist, while ‘Leaving Shallot’ is very naturalistic,” he said. “Both plays contain a mix of humor and serious emotion, though the balance is more comic in ‘Peephole’ and more dramatic in ‘Leaving Shallot.’”
This is his fourth production in the Arena Theatre, and Willis said he has been faced with coordinating the efforts of all the artists working on the production of both plays, instead of just one.
“Part of the fun of the evening of the two plays is that they are very different stylistically,” Willis said. “Seeing the two styles side by side gives audience members a chance to compare their own reactions to the different styles in a more immediate fashion than seeing separate productions at separate times.”
Tickets are available at the EMU Ticket Office and on the days of performances at the University Theatre Box Office in Villard Hall. Curtain time for all performances is 8 p.m., and no late seating is allowed. For more information, call 346-4363 or 346-4191.
Lisa Toth is the Pulse and features editor
for the Oregon Daily Emerald. She can be reached at [email protected].