What goes on in a young woman's mind about the guy shes been kissing? How can a couple of secret agents save the world? What prompts a boy to realize his mother doesn't love him? Is there really a reason to get off the couch and go to work? Can you ever be free, or is freedom just another box?
These are some of the questions that eight HSU student playwrights address in the fast-paced form of the ten minute play. These scripts, developed through the year, will be brought to life by student directors and actors in the 9th annual HSU Ten Minute Play Festival at Gist Hall Theatre on the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May.
"A good ten minute play captures a peak moment," said Margaret Thomas Kelso, HSU Assistant Professor of Theatre who heads the dramatic writing program, and coordinates the annual 10 Minute Play Festival. It's highly intensified and very focused. It's usually the moment of change in a story-- the climax."
On a simple, modular set, student actors and directors will take audiences to some Mayan ruins, a slacker apartment, an inner city streetcorner and into the bowels of a very strange funeral home. One play ventures into a young girl's imagination, while another witnesses a young mans recollection of his childhood
The process that leads to the festival begins in the fall, when students in several dramatic writing classes submit scripts to a panel of three faculty members in November, who select the plays that will be produced in April.
Playwrights have worked on their scripts all year, then directors and actors work with the writers through the spring semester to realize their visions on stage. The result is one of the more popular theatrical events of the year at HSU.
One of the plays first seen in last years HSU 10 Minute Play Festival won national recognition. "Mother Courageous" by Kato Buss was one of twelve plays selected from the U.S. for the Mid America Theatre Conference 2007 Playwriting Symposium.
This year's plays are: "Lonely Little Girls" by Erica Davie, "Concrete Evidence" by Missy Hopper, "Circus Beneath the Breasts" by Joe Castro, "Between a Rock and a Soft Place" by Alyssa Lomier, "Cold Footsies in the Hands of Fortune's Wheel: A Love Story" by Renee Carney, "I Have a Dream Too" by Richard Renteria, and "Freebox" by Kato Buss.
You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll do it again and again at the HSU Annual 10 Minute Play Festival, Thursday through Saturday, April 26-28, and May 3-5 at 7:30 PM in Gist Hall Theatre on the HSU campus in Arcata. Ticket: $5 general, $3 student/senior, limited seating free to HSU students, from HSU Ticket Office (826-3928.) HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance production; Margaret Kelso, advisor. http://10hsu.blogspot.com/.