Student Director Embraces the Absurd at Play Festival
By Zach Thomae
Jacob Turner laughs, filming the stage. He’s filming a play. Right now, a woman named Hawkins is the target of a great deal of laughter, because her boss, Burchard, has put laxatives in her drink. She’s upset with him, but in a silly and aloof way, stumbling through a series of sudden, embarrassing exits. Jacob laughs with the audience, perhaps because of how the characters onstage seem to acknowledge how lowbrow and juvenile the joke is.
Jacob is actually the director of this play, which was one of three selected to be showcased in the 21st annual Marcia Légère Student Play Festival.
Jacob almost didn’t get involved in the play festival. He had wanted to submit a script, but didn’t have any ideas. “After that, I saw ads for directing, and at first I didn’t want to, because the deadline was tomorrow, but then I saw another ad saying, “We still need directors,” so they clearly needed someone. So I applied, and then they hired me. I was actually the first director hired.”
The play festival was “started … in 1992 as an alternative theater venue for students.” The festival has been funded by Marcia Légère Binns, a former student playwright, since 1992.
The Wisconsin Union Directorate (WUD) Performing Arts Committee hosts the play festival every year and has to start early to get the festival ready for spring. According to Hope Evans, the play festival coordinator, “Students submit scripts in September. Of these, a panel of judges pick the three best scripts—these will be performed at the festival. Then, the committee hires directors for the plays, who then hold auditions to find cast members.”
Jacob directed the last of the three plays featured in the play festival. The first, “Live Long and Let the Force be with you,” is about a “Star Wars” family with a “Trekkie” son, and his attempt to “come out” to his family. According to Brendan Getches, who portrayed the father in the family, everybody on the cast was a geek—“That helped a lot.”
The second, “One Highly Staged Act,” follows an aloof playwright as he tries to write a play for a student play competition while dealing with a crush on his friend’s sister. I wondered if Andrew Morland, the actor who played the playwright, was like this in real life. His response: “Actually, I’m basically like this.”
Jacob’s play, “The Deadly Ostrich,” stars another playwright, Burchard, trying to solve a mystery of misplaced mail and murder-by-ostrich. It is an absurd play; Henry Mackaman, who wrote the original script, says that he just “had this idea” for a story, and that he “just went ham on it.” The play started out as a short story, but Henry turned it into a script after it was done.
He was also the only director with experience. Having written plays since middle school, he had the opportunity to direct one of his own his senior year of high school. It was called “Murther!,” and it was about “a girl who wants a job and becomes a maid in a strange place and people start getting ‘murthered.’ It’s my twisted spoof of a ‘whodunit.’”
This is the first time he’s directed a play that he hasn’t written. He say she did most of the same things he did with his last play in directing “Ostrich,” but with a limited budget and limited time to do rehearsals, he had to use his time much more effectively.
Jacob’s currently writing another play—his friend A.J. Schoeberle says that he’s constantly bouncing ideas off of him as he thinks of them, “sometimes all at once and without explaining them.” However, he’s beginning to spend more time with other forms of performance art, particularly film. He’s always had a passion for films and television (and his mentor was a screenwriter), but he hasn’t had the resources to pursue that until now. He’s founded a screenwriter’s club through WUD Publications Committee, which is currently in trial phase. And, with help from some of his friends, he’s self-published a book, Fantasmajoria, currently available for the Amazon Kindle.
Even though he directed it, Jacob is modest about his own role. He sees the play as a collaborative effort–as he told me, “some of the funniest bits came from the actors themselves.” At the beginning, “the writer is like water, and everything flows from that like a great big soup.”
I asked Henry about the final production, to see what the water thought of his soup: “I’m really happy with how it turned out. Hawkins was exactly as I imagined her.”
Did you know that Erin Bannen, one of the Theater interns writing for Terrace Views, wrote a play for the festival last year? You can read about it here!
