Now that “365 Plays/ 365 Days: Wesleyan University” is a memory, many around campus have been wondering exactly what the plays were about. With a week full of great lectures, performances, and impromptu fun, the wonderful and short performances seemed to have been lost in all the excitement.
This, however, should not be the case. More than 13 plays were performed throughout this past week, and all were superbly executed and acted.
Week 13 of Suzan-Lori Parks’ 52 weeks of theater contained some of the most moving, motivating, and confusing plays to ever hit campus. With themes varying from patriotism to historical memory, the Wesleyan “365” team managed to move audiences with every performance.
The week’s plays included “Hail and Farewell,” “Worms,” “The Lakeshore Limited,” “Orange,” “The Original Motherfucker,” “(Again) Sometimes God is a Soprano,” “Father Comes Home from the Wars, Part II,” and “The River Through Elizabethtown New Jersey.”
All skillfully directed and acted, these plays each contained a different message that often lingered within those watching and involved in their production.
“My favorite play [of week 13] is ‘The Lakeshore Limited,’” said director and event organizer Jess Posner ’09. “I found myself really moved by this play’s message: people need something to be on-board with—even if it is incomprehensible—it is all in the delivery rather than the content, something that we experience and observe all of the time.”
“Hail and Farewell” captivated audiences with its hilarious monologues and vivid explanations. In this play, Jermaine Lewis ’09 is a conductor orchestrating Mike Chandler ’08, Jennifer Celestin ’07, Garret Larribas ’07, and Maya Kazan ’09 through personal monologues about their daily lives. Audience members rolled with laughter throughout the performance, particularly in response to both Chandler’s description of his huge physical and personal status and Celestin’s explanation of why she was afraid of deer. One of the most impressive parts about this specific play was that the actors wrote the monologues themselves. In the script, Parks only included prompts to start the actors.
The Write On! Playwriting Competition encouraged similar creativity from participants. Gabriel Fries ’09 and Matt Connolly ’09 organized the playwriting contest, which had playwrights of all ages and abilities going through the same process that Parks had when writing “365,” writing one play a day.
“We wanted to encourage people to write plays and inspire people to think about life in a different way,” Fries said.
Plays were submitted on a daily basis, with authors deciding how many plays to submit throughout the five competition days. Ten brave individuals submitted a play every day, and were rewarded with a prize from Fries and Connolly at the end of the closing ceremonies last Sunday. More than 75 plays were submitted all together.
“We got everything from kitchen sink realism to wild stylized flights on fancy,” Connolly said.
Five of the submitted plays, one for each day of the week that submissions were accepted, were performed on Sunday. Many of them drew on young adult themes, such as finding one’s self and discovering romantic relationships.
One crowd favorite entitled “It Always Rains When John Cusack is in Agony,” written by David Henry Haan ’06, has Chandler playing an anguished John Cusack. Throughout the play, Cusack slowly discovers that his entire life has mirrored the stereotypical John Cusack film, the most notable aspect of this being the rainy weather that occurs whenever his emotions take a dark turn. He becomes unsure if his happy ending will ever come.
Other plays took on a more serious tone. Friday’s winner, written by Abigail Bader ’07, depicted one woman watching her lover fall asleep while she disclosed what she needed from and loved about her partner. Beautifully acted by Celestin and Kazan, the play was a perfect ending to the five winning plays. Afterward, Bader discussed her process, one that mirrored all the playwrights’ commitments to challenging subject matter and well-told stores.
“After seeing the players perform an example of one of Parks’ plays at the first Write-On session at BrewBakers [the local coffee shop that provided support and space for the competition throughout the week], I became interested in using the short play format to examine sort of archetypal relationships,” Bader said. “I wanted to find situations and moments that can be easily and profoundly be understood, though a minimum of specific detail is communicated.”
“When I wrote the play that they chose,” Bader continued, “I was thinking about how sometimes we say we love someone when what we really mean is that we desire something from them. The idea of love-as-giving is often a lie we tell in order to get at the heart of someone, to find their secrets. The play was very much about one person violating another person’s space.”