“2m, 2f: A Perfectly Ordinary Evening of Theatre” will turn out to be a not so ordinary evening.
With hallucinating characters, dramatic love affairs, and even a play done backwards, these comical one-acts will leave the audience simultaneously entertained and intrigued.
“They are complex, interesting and very impressive for being short one-acts,” said Arielle Cardona, a junior studying creative writing and communication who stars in the plays. “They make you question your life choices and makes you learn, but only if you let yourself,” Cardona said.
Tucson Fiction Project, a student club created last school year, will showcase these three brand-new, never-before-seen one-acts written, produced and performed by students. Club creators Michael Weingartner, a junior studying creative writing, molecular and cellular biology, and ecology and evolutionary biology, and media arts major Logan Smith will show students just how far their creativity can take them.
Free for everyone, each 20-minute one-act was written by Weingartner at a different point in his life, but after putting them together, he realizes they are all related.
A Q&A forum will follow the performance each night. The panel of directors, playwright, and performers hopes to generate discussion about the process of the play and production development as well as hear feedback about the plays. Weingartner also hopes the Q&A will lead other students to produce their own productions and screenplays through the Tucson Fiction Project club.
The club is dedicated to student actors, filmmakers, producers, writers, musicians and creative minds alike and is about taking ideas and getting them produced and published in any way possible.
“It’s all about getting writers together and creating new work,” he said.
Weingartner said he was told by the student provost and film and theater department when he first discussed the start of Tucson Fiction Project that “no one has ever done something like this.”
Weingartner and Smith hope the Tucson Fiction Project, supported mainly by the Honors College, will inspire more playwrights, directors, and actors and prove that a there is a vehicle to showcase what they have created.
“In a real sense, this project stands for the fact that it doesn’t take the resources of an entire department or theater company. It’s a small way of doing something big,” Weingartner said.
For Smith, “it’s all about making theater instead of doing theater.”
Students can’t just be creative, they need to actually create. Just because you can’t find a club with your interests or the school doesn’t provide anything for you, doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Be a trailblazer and others will join, Smith said.
“There is no excuse,” he said. “Get involved. If you love it, go do it.”
The Plays:
“Surreal for Breakfast”: “When a beleaguered housewife suspects her husband of an affair, she brings it up with her own lover, a handsome and charming man who just so happens to look strangely like her husband. Love, marriage, kids and betrayal are all explored in this hilarious absurdist suburban farce.”
“Everybody is Blake Hamilton”: “When Kyle is forced to meet his ex-girlfriend’s perfect new boyfriend Blake, things go from bad to worse when, suddenly, every man on the planet begins to look and sound just like Blake Hamilton. Watch Kyle struggle to overcome his past, his insecurities and his mental breakdown in this fast-paced psychological comedy.”
“The Backwards Play”: “A romantic comedy told in reverse, this play follows two strange couples as they explore relationships, language, pop culture and just how difficult it can be sometimes to move forward in life.”
