By Rick Pender
NKyTribune correspondent
Something theatrical has happened at Northern Kentucky University every two years since 1981, and it’s unique to the Highland Heights campus. It’s the biennial Year End Series (Y.E.S.) Festival, back for its 17th iteration between April 16 and 26. Sandra Forman, the NKU theater professor, who has overseen at least 10 festivals, says she knows of no other university that regularly undertakes a festival on this scale. “One or two might have readings or produce a new work, but no one does anything like this.”
The event was inspired in 1980 when some NKU faculty members attended the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. “They said, ‘We could do that here!’” Forman wonders if they envisioned what an undertaking it would become. It takes a solid 18 months – from calling for scripts to the final curtain.
“We look at each play and ask ourselves, ‘Can we cast it? Can we build it? Is it a well written, interesting story?’” Many contemporary playwrights, sensitive to the expense of producing a show with a large cast, write scripts with just two or three characters. But because NKU’s theater department has a lot of young actors, larger casts — as many as eight or 10 actors — can easily be assembled.
For the 2015 festival Forman and her colleagues read 431 plays. Each theater professor reads and evaluates scripts, a process that narrows the number to approximately 40. Then they’re passed around and rated; a high score evoking another high score moves that script up the list. By the fall prior to the festival, the number has been reduced to a dozen or so plays. That’s when the three directors who have been engaged to stage the shows are asked to read them and indicate their interest.
Over the past 34 years, many of the 50 or so shows that have debuted during Y.E.S. festivals have been published. Forman says, “It’s easier for a playwright to get published if his or her show has been produced. Several of our shows have had off-Broadway productions.”
Playwrights receive a $500 stipend and are NKU’s guest for the week prior to the show’s opening to refine the script and work with the actors and directors. “They come in a week before the production opens, attend rehearsals, conduct master classes with students. They are totally involved in final tech and dress rehearsals.”
For 2015, Forman says the three shows are “fun plays, not so much serious drama.” Terry Powell’s It’s a Grand Night for Murder, a spoof of murder mysteries, kicks off the festival on Thursday evening, April 16. On Friday night, April 17, David L. Williams’ The Divine Visitor, a Restoration comedy with a sci-fi overlay will debut. The third show, Colin Speers Crowley’s Encore, Encore, a play about legendary wit and caustic critic Dorothy Parker, premieres on Saturday evening, April. 18.
Once opened, the shows are presented in rotating repertory, with Murder and Encore splitting time to get five performances apiece in NKU’s 325-seat Corbett Theatre; The Divine Visitor will have eight performances in the Robert and Rose Stauss Theatre, NKU’s black box theater that seats 150.
Ed Cohen, a veteran community theater director who regularly stages shows for NKU, is handling Encore.
“I tell people to go with an open mind. They’re going to be good shows — very modern with three different writing styles. No one has ever performed them before, so they’re also shows no one has ever seen before. You can be the first audience to do that.” — NKU junior Rhys Boatwright
“I thought this was the best play that I read, so I was glad to get the assignment,” he says. “The students didn’t really know much about Dorothy Parker, but she is an interesting person they can relate to — the first important female theater critic. It’s a story about her failed marriage to a man who went off to World War I and came back a different person.”
“The show is highly theatrical,” Cohen adds, “a memory play that jumps around in time to portray this woman who is witty and smart, but not really a nice person at all.”
Victoria Hawley, a senior theater major from Cloverport in Western Kentucky, is playing Parker. “She’s chock full of quips,” Hawley says, “but I’m trying to discover more of her heart.” She said she’s excited by the opportunity to create a role in a new play. “Not many people my age get to do this. I’m a fan of new works — you have to start from scratch and work your way up.”
Hawley acted in Spake in the 2013 Y.E.S. Festival, a new play by David L. Williams, and loved the experience of working with the playwright. “You have to be prepared for the script to change,” she says, but the chance to learn from a playwright first-hand was worth it.
Williams, who did a workshop in 2013 about writing about relationships between characters, is back in 2015 with The Divine Visitor. He’s only the second playwright in the festival’s history to be selected more than once. (Plays are read “blind,” with no writer designated, so the odds are steep against being selected for consecutive festivals.) Senior Miki Abraham from Paducah is playing an essential role in The Divine Visitor’s second act, someone from the future who time-travels to the 16th century and changes the dynamic of a charlatan who’s been seducing women by posing as a ghost.
NKU senior Victoria Hawley plays Dorothy Parker in ‘Encore, Encore.’ (Photo provided)
Abraham is already a veteran performer — she’s performed at regional theaters and will be heading to New York City after graduation for a possible role in the touring production of Beautiful: The Carol King Musical. She’s an African American, and she says, “It means a lot as a black girl to be able to create a character. My character wasn’t written as black or white. I like playing the girl from the future who comes in loud and obnoxious.”
Rhys Boatwright is a junior who graduated from Elder High School in Cincinnati; he’s playing Phil in A Grand Night for Murder. He says director Terry Powell told him that Phil is not the kind of guy who does crazy things, but crazy things happen to him. In fact, Phil wants to put a hit on his wife, but he loses control of the situation. “He’s a kind of average Joe, a little nerdy, a little quirky — but he does hire a hit man, so he’s not so innocent.”
Boatwright says, “I tell people to go with an open mind. They’re going to be good shows — very modern with three different writing styles. No one has ever performed them before, so they’re also shows no one has ever seen before. You can be the first audience to do that.”
Sandra Forman sums up the Y.E.S. Festival by saying, “Working on a new play is the quintessential theatrical experience. There are no reviews of how so-and-so played the part, so performers and directors and designers have to be totally creative. They start with the script and then go within themselves. That’s the value of this effort for the young artists we are training.”
