By: Zoe Rodriguez
Every year Ms. Faulstich and the rest of the theater department organize the Playwrights Festival, an event where students are given four weeks to prepare a ten minute play and perform it in front of anyone who wants to show up. This year the festival took place at 7 PM on Thursday May 1st . Because the plays are only ten minutes each, the event was also rather short, only about an hour long not counting the Q&A afterwards with the cast.
There was a clear passion put into the plays from every kid involved. They seemed like they were having a blast and that infectious joy was definitely felt by the audience. There were also much fewer students participating than in previous years, most of which were also in the school musical. So as a result, many acted in multiple plays and even wrote, directed, or blocked everything themselves.
The plots of the plays were also significantly darker than expected, with many of their plots circling around death in one way or another. The highlight of the show, at least for me, was the play “The Last Will,” written by Aiden Green. For a quick synopsis; an old man dies and after mourning, his family gathers to read his will. One of the men in this family has a wife who was jealous that she inherited nothing, so she pulls out a gun and threatens to shoot everyone if she isn’t handed the will. They refuse, so everyone but her ends up dying. The plot twist came as a massive shock to the audience, and was delivered amazingly by Tatum Langway as the jealous wife.
I has the pleasure of interviewing Tatum after the play, and these are her responses:
- What was the overall experience/community like?
The playwright’s festival was very fun, but also kind of stressful. We had a very quick turnaround in four weeks, which is less than half of other writing elements at Bedford. Everyone was working at their maximum capacity. We had to be actors, directors, and stage crew all at once.
- Were there any unexpected challenges that came up during the writing/directing process that you’d like to share?
The hardest part of the production was the memorization part (I wrote all my lines down in a notebook to get them into muscle memory), and, as a director, having to tone a buzzkill. Because we had four weeks, we had literally no time to waste, which was hard considering everyone there kept getting distracted (including me).
- Is there anyone you worked with in particular that you’d like to shout out?
I would like to shout of Victoria Cargiuolo, my co-director for working on basically every single play. She made or found basically all of our props, and her lighting design is truly amazing for someone doing it for the first time. I would also like to shout out all of my amazing actors for bringing my characters to life.
