If nothing else, the playwrights and production coordinator of the Brown/Trinity New Plays Festival, which is running through Feb. 12, promise that the festival will live up to its name.
The goal of the festival is to allow talented young playwrights, in this case one undergraduate and two graduate students in the Department of Literary Arts, to experiment with their work.
"This was a chance for playwrights to dig a little bit deeper into their own work," said Becca Wolff, the production coordinator of the festival who works in the Department of Literary Arts.
According to Dan LeFranc, a first-year graduate student and writer of the play "Bruise Easy," "These plays are really representative of where American theater will be headed."
LeFranc, along with fellow playwrights Krista Knight '06 and first-year graduate student Cory Hinkle, has spent the last several months translating his ideas from vision to script and from script to production.
The process began in a graduate seminar led by Erin Cressida Wilson, an English professor in the Literary Arts program. LeFranc said Wilson asked the students to make a list of their greatest fears as a class assignment. LeFranc wrote that his "worst fear was to lose a parent without knowing why." Thus, the seed of "Bruise Easy" was planted.
In the play, directed by Makaela Pollock GS, two estranged siblings living in Orange County, Calif., realize one day that their mother has disappeared. The play follows the siblings' increasingly desperate actions throughout the day as they try to make sense of what has happened to their mother.
Much of "Bruise Easy" is drawn from ancient Greek plays such as Sophocles' "Electra." LeFranc hopes, however, that viewers will see his play as an original in its own right.
"I wanted it to be its own thing," he said.
A key aspect of the play is its treatment of Orange County and its flat culture. LeFranc, who grew up in South Orange County, wanted to express the "middle class ennui and malaise" he feels permeates the atmosphere.
"There is an absence of real culture there," he said. "The culture is as artificial as the landscape, which is now mostly strip malls."
Wolff, who has worked with all three playwrights throughout the many stages of production, agreed that the play was "very transposed into the modern setting and culture."
"Dan worked with very universal themes about family and the types of dynamics that make people feel trapped," Wolff said.
She also expressed satisfaction with the playwrights' results, especially given the limited amount of time they were given to write and produce the plays. Once the plays were selected, the playwrights went straight to casting in December. They chose actors from first-year graduate students at Brown and the Trinity Repertory Company, along with a few professional actors.
Next, the playwrights and their directors were given a month to work with designers on their sets, sound, costumes and other elements of the production. They did not begin rehearsals until the second half of January, so they had only three weeks to rehearse the plays.
However, because the plays were written in a workshop setting, forming a positive bond between writer, director and actor came easily, as all three had been following the play's progress from its conception.
"We began to see the play in three dimensions very early on in the process," LeFranc said. He said he was deeply appreciative of the help from the students in his workshop.
"It's our work, but it is so much about a collaborative process," he said.
Knight's play, called "Spoken Insects" and directed by Peter Sampieri, tells the story of a rising flood in Quincy, Illi. and the attempts of various characters, including a chicken, to quell the deluge. Wolff called the play "a pretty experimental piece" about "the problems and deficiencies of language." Much of the play, which she defined as "comedic," revolves around the characters' inability to communicate effectively with each other.
"It is about what people say when they don't know what they want to say to each other," Wolff said. "Krista wants to express human frustration over communication."
Hinkle's play "Cipher," directed by Donya Washington GS, is much more grounded in modern life and events. Wolff called it "the most current of the three," as it follows a man named Clerk B, whose job is to monitor suspected terrorists from an underground government office and prevent them from attacking America. The play is slightly fantastic; Clerk B cannot remember his own past, but he can read the minds of others.
"It has an element of dreaminess," Wolff said. "It's trying to communicate two worlds on stage."
Like the other two plays, "Cipher" tries to do something that is different from anything an audience has ever seen before.
"This is about really skilled writers going in new directions," Wolff said. "It is always surprising, very immediate. It was a chal-lenge, but I think we've done a successful job."
Performances are free. "Spoken Insects" will be performed tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 2 p.m. "Cipher" will be performed on Sunday at 2 p.m. and "Bruise Easy" will be performed tomorrow at 8 p.m. All performances will take place at the McCormack Family Theater.
