After their tech rehearsal, four actors in costume, a director, and a playwright piled into an Arnold Hall elevator going to the ninth floor. They didn’t get through their entire play in the strictly enforced 10 minute slot they were given. Everyone was tense. They knew they needed to cut at least two minutes off their run time before the show, in two hours, but they didn’t know how.
“That was good, guys,” said the director, Emily Messana, a freshman in the directing track at The New School for Drama.
“We just need to push it… to the limit,” added the playwright, Sophia Cohen Smith, who is graduating from The New School for Drama this spring.
A couple actors half-heartedly sang a bar of “Push it to the limit” from the original High School Musical. But these weren’t basketball players preparing for a playoff, they were drama students participating in the fall 2016 New Works Festival, and they had way more stress to deal with than Troy Bolton ever did.
The New Works Festival is put on once every semester by Naked Angels, the professional theater company within The New School for Drama. It is a seven day festival wherein groups of four to six students write, direct, and perform their own 10-minute play. Each semester it is assisted by teaching artists from each field (playwriting, directing, and acting). This semester the teaching staff for New Works was completely made up of The New School for Drama alumni.
It’s certainly a challenge to write, direct, and perform a play in one week, but all drama students are encouraged to participate and practice their craft without the pressure of being graded. This New Works Festival featured seven original ten-minute plays put on by 37 students, and the first to include every graduating class of the BFA program.
The New School Free Press decided to follow Smith’s play, “The Day the Void Spit Back,” through The New School for Drama’s New Works Festival last week. Smith, a senior in New School for Drama, will be graduating this Spring with the hope of becoming a director in New York theater productions. Much like the main characters in her play, Smith maintained a lighthearted attitude, and often found a way to laugh at herself throughout the week.
Monday: Olé Bitches
“Ten-minute plays are their own specific entity,” Claire Keichel said as she began her workshop. Kiechel, a New School for Drama alum and playwright based in New York, was the playwright teaching artist for this New Works Festival, as well as the one last fall. In a matter of three days, each of the seven students in front of her would have to write an original 10-minute play.
She asked them to open their notebooks for a listing exercise. The topics ranged from ‘worst band names’ to ‘people you hate.’ The idea was to get their minds moving and fluid; they needed inspiration to strike as soon as possible. The playwrights frantically scribbled their ideas on each topic for a minute straight. After ten minutes, and ten lists, they emerged, rubbing their sore hands.
“Does anyone want to share their worst band names?” asked Keichel.
“All I could think of was… Olé bitch,” offered Smith.
The room erupted with laughter. That wouldn’t be the last they saw of, “Olé Bitch!”
Tuesday: Getting it on Paper
The playwrights and their teacher manifested a list of rules for their plays on the whiteboard. The rules included: “No random dying,” and “MUST include the phrase ‘Olé bitch.’”Instructed to write for two hours, Smith opted to work in the quieter Arnold hall eighth-floor library to escape the noise and chaos of the ninth floor.
At the end of the session she e-mailed Keichel what she wrote and committed to sending a second draft by 1 p.m the next day.
Wednesday & Thursday: Edits and Cuts
Her play, “The Day the Void Spit Back,” was explained by Smith as “an exploration of what you do when you’re faced with the ramifications of what you think you [resolved] in a casual, hung over sitting on a stoop in Red Hook, the morning after Halloween.”
Over two days of read-throughs and editing, both in the workshop room and at home, she cut seven pages of her script and fine-tuned her characters. She left the fourth and final workshop at 9:30 p.m with conviction, even though she had less than three hours before the deadline for her final draft.
Script, check.
Friday: Enter the Directors
Noa Egozi, a New School for Drama alumna, and founding member of Second Circle Theatre, was the directing teaching artist for this New Works Festival. The night of her workshop in Arnold Hall she was faced with a room of apprehensive directors
“I was a little nervous,” admitted Messana, the director for “The Day the Void Spit Back.” “I received the play at 1:30 a.m [last night]. My initial thoughts were this was going to be hard, but it was also going to be fun.”
When Egozi asked the directors what their play meant to them, Messana answered, “It’s about the kind of friendship where you’re so close with someone you’d do anything to keep them.”
Messana was referring to the main characters of “The Day the Void Spit Back,” Sexy Ghost and Pirate, two good friends who created a ‘void’ to, as Pirate says in the script, “do away with the [bad] memories…evacuate them from the universe.” When they wake up on the morning of November 1st, a stranger in a cat costume, or as Sexy Ghost puts it, “an asshole from uptown,” tells them they’re just avoiding their problems.
Saturday: The First Rehearsal
At 4 p.m, the cast for “The Day the Void Spit Back” was still missing an actor and the six-hour delay was beginning to weigh on the director.
“I wouldn’t care if it was my play,” said Messana,“but it’s Sophia’s. I want it to be good for her.”
“In the [past] 12 hours, I focused on how to [stage] the void,” Messana said. Faced with the challenge of making a visual representation of a pit of nothingness, she had to get creative. She recruited acting major Morgan Fay to play the entity of the void, dressed in a fitted purple bed sheet.
“[She] just spat brilliance on me,” Smith later commented, delighted with the decision.
At 4:15 p.m, the full cast was present and began rehearsals. They worked for four hours, reading through their scripts as Messana looked on, advising them on how they should move and say their lines. By 8:30pm, the play was ready to go.
After their first read through, Messana asked them who they thought their characters were.
“She refuses to be a sexy cat because of her [feminist values],” explained freshman Emma Ecklund, the actor playing ‘Cat’. “She’s like… a Lang student.”
As the team left the 16th street building for the night, Messana reminded her actors that they needed to memorize their lines by 10:30 a.m. tomorrow.
Sunday: Showtime
Once again, the group got a late start for the day, due to a missing actor. At 1 p.m, finally reunited, they began the first run through of the play without their scripts. Smith is present and watching her play performed for the first time; the day before she’d been unable to attend rehearsal due to a directing project. She laughed, generously and with relief, at each joke as her actors performed them. “[Messana] stayed true to what I wrote, [while] bringing things out I didn’t even know [were there],” Smith said post first viewing.
In the two hours before their tech rehearsal at 3:15, they ran lines, rehearsed, and put together costumes.
After tech, the group retreated to a multi-purpose room on the ninth floor, determined to cut their run time by at least two minutes in the two hours they have before the show begins in order to fit the 10-minute guideline set for all plays in New Works. From the window, they could see a dark cloud hanging over the Freedom Tower as rain began to pour down. “It looks like the world is ending,” said Fay. “It feels like the world is ending,” replied Smith.
6:00 p.m rolled around and the moment they’ve been working towards was here: showtime.
All seven plays were slated to play back-to-back. They didn’t quite have a full house, but the performance space was fairly full with about forty attendees when Stephanie Cunningham, the production manager for New Works, introduced the show. “Seven days ago the plays you’re seeing tonight did not exist,” she explained to the audience made up mostly of friends and family of drama students.
“The Day the Void Spit Back” was the fourth play in the show. It followed “10 Steps,” an emotional play about human trafficking written by Victoria Tamez.
The audience was slowly lifted from the state of felt compassion Tamez’s play created with sympathy for her underage protagonists, and into laughter as Ecklund, Vasquez, Roumo, and Fay threw whimsical Halloween-themed garbage around the stage. They were laughing from the time the lights rose on Cat and Sexy Ghost haphazardly sleeping on Pirate’s stoop, to when they fell on Pirate and Sexy Ghost lighting the void on fire and exclaiming “Olé, bitch!”
It wasn’t a perfect performance, they were still over the 10-minute mark, but the audience loved them nonetheless.
As they scraped together the mess on the stage post-performance, Smith watched from the second row. “I’m really proud of them,” she said.
“Making something out of nothing creates these incredible art making experiences that I would never, ever trade,” Smith said about her experience with New Works this semester.
Photo: Brittany Lizotte