Student-run New Works Festival will feature five student-written and directed original plays on the Kleist Mainstage at 7:30 p.m. today. The performances will range from 15-minute plays to complete one-acts.
The initiative for the festival sparked when the Advanced Directing course, THE-490, was not offered for spring 2024, resulting in the absence of the annual 10-Minute Play Festival.
“Losing that class means that there’s no good capstone for acting and directing
majors who want to go into directing,” said Nash Feiler, junior BFA acting student and the administrator of The New Works Festival. “That’s an important capstone we lost.”
This is not the first time a New Works Festival has taken Baldwin Wallace’s center stage. In 2022, current BFA acting seniors Michael Shoultz, Jake Diller and Evan Vay organized The New Works Festival after recognizing a lack of studentrun productions on campus.
“Me and Jake had talked about putting something out again, but we also had a lot of things going on,” Shoultz said, “and then Nash had separately had the idea to make their own New Works festival… It’s awesome to see the torch passing.”
“It’s kind of a substitute that allows more freedom for students who haven’t taken that class yet,” said Troian Butler, senior acting and directing student and director of “Damn Straight.”
Shoultz, who is also the writer and director of the play, “Waiting for Tito’s,” said she believes the New Works Festival allows students to strengthen their fundamentals of theatre production on a small scale.
“In all our classes we get an education on the broadest sense of theatre, but it’s hard to
learn those specifics if you’re not doing the thing,” Shoultz said.
Shoultz said experiencing the work is what matters.
“Maybe you do the time, and you start to get a sense of things, that might be the thing that you love and that you’re best at in the world. But you’ll never know until you try,” Shoultz said.
All students had the opportunity to audition for the festival, and Feiler personally selected plays by fellow students to put on the Mainstage. Student directors could choose which play they wanted to direct out of the selection. All festival elements allowed BW theatre students a hands-on, original theatre experience, in whichever realm they wanted to try.
Feiler wants The New Works Festival to be an opportunity for viewers to acknowledge the directing work of the graduating acting and directing majors. In addition to the festival’s Mainstage performance, The New Works Festival will also have an Ovation exhibit to discuss the project and promote attendance.
“It is rare that we see purely student-driven pieces. Usually, we’re performing in a play that was written by a professional, directed by a professional instructor,” Feiler said. “This is your chance to see the work of student playwrights, student directors and student actors.”
“With something like this, we’re able to see theatre made for young people, which is something we’re not able to see very often in professional theatre,” Shoultz said.
As student-run works are uncommon compared to BW’s typical faculty-led productions, Feiler, Shoultz and Butler encourage all students to attend the festival. After seeing Feiler organize the festival two years after Shoultz premiered the concept, the graduating senior described this year’s process as giving him hope.
“It feels like the end of a coming-of-age movie when you realize that the world is going to continue to move on,” Shoultz said. “It’s really cool to see. It gives me hope for the future of art and things generally, which is awesome.”
The New Works Festival features “Damn Straight” written by Nash Feiler and directed by Troian Butler; “Familiar Spirits” by Cole Tarantowski and directed by Alex Minyard; “Waiting for Tito’s” written and directed by Michael Shoultz; “The Manhattan Project by Moonlight” by Calvin Cavagnaro and directed by Nelia Rose Holley and assistant directed by Ava Spinelli Mastrone and “Enjoy the Silence” by Greta Bedell and directed by Bella Issa.
