A festival of new plays will be showcased on the Monmouth College campus this weekend, February 20th through the 22nd, as student playwrights and directors are featured in “Breaking Ground.” Senior Edrass Chavez-Alvarado shares his play and how the “Breaking Ground” concept came to be:
“I wrote the ten-minute play ‘Katia.’ It will be one of four featured in “Breaking Ground.” “Breaking Ground” is a new work festival, which is a little similar to something that used to be done at Monmouth. We used to have the “Fusion Fest.” It was a 24-hour play festival. Rather than having a 24-hour turnaround, these plays were worked on extensively over last semester and winter break, so that this could be the best writing that our students could produce,” says Chavez-Alvarado.
Monmouth College Junior Ray Shaul, will take on two roles this weekend:
“I am a playwright and director. I wrote ‘Ash on the Heart’ and I directed Adyson Beebe’s play ‘With You Always.’ It is coming along really fast. We had three weeks to prepare from casting until now. All the teams have been working super hard to make these shows come to life,” Shaul explains.
“Breaking Ground” will be presented on the Monmouth College campus at 7:30 pm on February 20th and 21st and the at 2 pm on February 22nd in the Hewes Library Studio Theatre.
Courtesy of Barry McNamara
A festival of new plays will be showcased at Monmouth College Feb. 20-22, as student playwrights and directors are featured in “Breaking Ground.”
The production, which features four short plays written by Monmouth students, will be staged in the Hewes Library Studio Theatre. Monmouth theatre professor Vanessa Campagna is overseeing it all.
“As I have experienced and come to understand them, the four plays deal with various forms of mysteries,” she said. “Collectively, I see through the plays that these students are questioning, thinking critically and actively reflecting about themselves, their world and what might be beyond it. I couldn’t be more proud of their hard work.”
Abby Zayas ’27 of Bloomington, Illinois, is both a playwright and a director for the show. The English major, who writes “a lot” and aspires to be an author for a living, noted that plays are different from other forms of writing due to the presence of a cast. The night before her interview, she’d been to the first rehearsal of her play, which is titled Something Fishy This Way Comes. She co-wrote it with Jennifer Ruscitti ’26 of Ingleside, Illinois.
“It was odd,” said Zayas. “I didn’t feel like I was watching something I’d written. People speaking, moving, the way they exist on the stage – a play takes on a life of its own, and it’s not really yours anymore. Each interpretation will be a little different.”
The play follows a pair of scientists working near the Illinois River who are trying to discern why fish are mutating. “Extra eyes, that type of thing, and it’s not the first time it’s happened,” said Zayas. “What’s going on? Is it radioactivity, or something deeper?”
Ruscitti and Zayas were writing partners in an “Advanced Creative Writing” class taught by English professor David Wright. The class agreed that the line, “I think this will affect the trout population,” would appear in each of their works. The pair were the only writers to actually feature fish so prominently. To create the dialogue in the two-person play, they simply chatted with each other over their laptops, assuming the personality of the scientists and making sure to type up the lines they felt were keepers.
Zayas is also co-directing the four-person cast of Edrass Chavez-Alvarado’s play, Katia, which Campagna said “offers an evocative exploration of freedom and redemption that is at once literal and metaphorical. The poetry of his characters, both human and supernatural, seems to place the play in conversation with Jose Rivera’s Marisol, which Edrass successfully directed in the fall.”
Another collaboration, of sorts
The other two playwrights are Ray Shaul ’27 of Bourbonnais, Illinois, and Adyson Beebe ’29 of Clinton, Illinois, and Shaul drew on Beebe’s experience for her play, Ash on the Heart.
“It’s decidedly grounded in reality but mines the inner lives of two characters whose reunion leaves more questions than answers – perhaps suggesting that we, in some ways, remain mysteries to ourselves as much as others,” said Campagna.
Ash on the Heart focuses on Sam, a hardworking, structured individual whose night, said Shaul, “is interrupted by chaos of their ex, Jo, coming back after two years on the run from responsibility in the haze of alcoholism. The play explores the line between reconciliation and the courage required to say goodbye.”
“I have to thank Dr. V for this opportunity to have my work performed and mentoring me on creating the work you’ll see on stage,” said Shaul. “I’d like to thank Adyson for trusting me to bring her story to the stage, and (student director) Vea Vavrosky for bringing my story to the stage.”
It’s the first of Shaul’s plays to be performed publicly, but another work, a Hallmark-style romance titled The Perfect Pitcher, was published on Amazon.
“I’ve loved writing since middle school,” said Shaul. “Many of my English assignments were writing narratives and short stories, and that’s merged into my love for theatre and wanting to create my own plays to be performed.”
Beebe wrote With You, Always, which Campagna said “centers the profound loss that accompanies the death of a loved one. Through what I’d call selective realism, she captures yearning for a connection that might transcend the physical realm.”
Monmouth College will present “Breaking Ground” at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 20-21 and at 2 p.m. Feb. 22 on campus in the Hewes Library Studio Theatre on the lower level of the facility. Tickets can be purchased online at www.purplepass.com.
