2023 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival (Week One)

"We Call It Family" by Laura Barbieri
(Convergence-Continuum, 2023)

The 2023 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival at Convergence-Continuum is now open! I joined a sold-out house on Thursday night to see the first two of three shows offered this year.

Interview plays were the thing this past semester. Eric Mansfield and I both composed interview-based plays for workshop (see: After Roe) while our colleague Laura Barbieri penned one for craft and theory. We Call It Family is the result of several in-depth interviews with couples and individuals who have participated in the foster care system.

Laura, Eric and I with our advisor
Mike Geither (far left)

Playwrights in their third year are expected to workshop a full-length play, most years the first and second year students offer a ten-minute play or one act. Because there were just the three of us, they each had the opportunity to offer a one hour work for this first weekend.

At the first read-through for Family, Barbieri told me she was mortified to discover her forty-eight page play read at over two hours! She wasted no time editing the piece, providing a new draft that runs neatly under an hour by the next rehearsal. Considering the subject matter, which can be distressing at times, the piece really moves, thanks to her great work in braiding the dialogue among six performers.

So, anyway, how do you stage an interview play? Director Emileo Fernandez took material which on the page is presentational – direct address to the audience – and made it kinetic. While some told their stories, others often assumed the role of the children who otherwise would not be seen, only spoken about.

Eric’s piece, Home Movie, centers on a quartet of siblings who discover an unhappy secret about their parents while clearing out their childhood home. Eric has carved out a fascinating niche for himself, using his experiences as both a journalist and a member of the armed forces to take ideas from true stories and shape them into drama with a lot of humorous interpersonal relationships.

He says what we saw this weekend was a shorter version of a longer piece, and I am very interested in whether that means it's the same story with more details, or we have only seen the first half of a two act play.

This entire first weekend of performances are sold out, next weekend it’s my play Scenes From a Night’s Dream and that Saturday night performance has already sold out! So that’s good news. For promotion, I asked members of our cast to tell me what they thought the play was about and rock star Con-Con multimedia artist Neil Sudhakaran created this video.

 

The 2023 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival continues at Convergence-Continuum through Saturday, February 18.