“Evil is not born, it’s made.” This prompt inspired three pairs of writer-directors participating in this term’s WiRED, a 24-hour playwriting experience sponsored by the theater department and the Displaced Theater Company. The process began at 8 p.m. on Friday when writer-directors, managers and actors met to play icebreaker games. The event culminated in a 45-minute production of three plays in the Bentley Theater on Saturday.
In total, 17 students participated in the productions in some form. The prompt was announced Friday evening, and after icebreaker games, teams flocked around campus for quiet places to work through the night.
Rebecca Asoulin ’17, who worked with Haley Reicher ’17 to write the play “Useless,” said she and Reicher chose to work in a Baker-Berry Library study room until it closed at 2 a.m. They then relocated to a Choates residential cluster common room. Fueled by coffee drinks, popcorn, pita chips and Cabot cheese, the two centered their play on the tense relationship between two boys, a bully and his victim. They incorporated the prompt into their conception of the bully, whom they depicted as having a troubled relationship with his father, Asoulin said.
“Amazingly, we weren’t dead tired all day on Saturday, but it’s insane,” Asoulin said. “There was one point where both of us had had it, and Haley was pacing around the library after drinking too much coffee.”
Asoulin is a member of The Dartmouth staff.
The two were able to beat out fatigue and writers’ block when they nearly simultaneously thought to include Lewis Carroll into their play, a favorite author of theirs, Asoulin said.
Luke Katler ’15, who co-wrote and directed “There’s a Monster in That Room” with Cooper Stimson ’13, said that the time pressure was hectic but motivating. Katler and Stimson worked at Stimson’s off-campus house and began brainstorming by sharing their initial reactions to the prompt.
Though they had not outlined a plot before WiRED began, Katler said he and Stimson agreed that they wanted to produce a more serious, dramatic vignette than what they produced when they worked together on WiRED in fall 2011. This year’s prompt and a full bag of Smartfood popcorn helped achieve this goal, Katler said.
“Once we had the conceptual idea, that was followed by the outline and the actual writing process,” Katler said. “Once we had the whole thing written, we didn’t change it.”
Katler is a member of The Dartmouth staff.
WiRED was overseen by four managers, Diane Chen ’14 and Amber Porter ’14, who also co-wrote and directed a play, as well as Ariel Klein ’17 and Naomi Lazar ’17. Chen and Porter have run WiRED together since their sophomore year and helped Klein and Lazar, who participated in WiRED last fall, take up the responsibility for the future.
Lazar said she was particularly excited about the prompt for this term’s WiRED show and the original villains it inspired writers to create.
Though the show’s managers are involved with the theater department and have experience stagemanaging, Klein called WiRED an “easy access way to get involved with theater for a day.”
Working drafts of scripts were due early Saturday morning, and casting began at 8 a.m. Due to a limited number of actors who auditioned to perform, many people were cast in more than one play. Actors were not expected to memorize their lines.
A small but supportive audience attended the evening performance. The show opened with Katler and Stimson’s play, which revolved around a fictitious mass murderer, Mandy, recounting her monstrous acts to a reporter, a cop and a psychologist while in prison.
Mandy’s character described how her evil tendencies began when she was a young girl and realized that she could manipulate her friends in petty fights about whether to play hopscotch or leap frog. Though largely filled with dark humor, lighter moments abounded in a scene where Mandy’s childhood friends spouted vulgar insults onstage.
Next came Asoulin and Reicher’s play where a bulley named Joey is called into the office of a professor. The professor is also Joey’s father and deems him “useless.” Next called into the office is the victim of Joey’s bullying, a math whiz named Lewis Carroll, whom the professor is more than happy to devote his attention to.
Joey takes out his frustration on Lewis, taunting that Lewis’s “wet dreams are in binary.”
The final show was Porter and Chen’s play “Introducing…” Porter described their play as sillier than the other two, spoofing the life of “Wicked” and “Frozen” (2013) actress-singer Idina Menzel by creating a villain named “Adele Dazeem,” referencing how John Travolta mispronounced her name at this year’s Academy Awards. The play included the villain snapping Travolta’s neck onstage.
The play also incorporated some of Menzel’s famous songs from playing Elphaba in “Wicked” and Elsa in “Frozen,” adding new lyrics and impressive vocals by Zahra Ruffin ’17. Enjoying the play’s nuances required familiarity with pop culture, and it concluded with British singer Adele mocking Leonardo DiCaprio for not winning an Oscar.
Chen half-jokingly described the end to WiRED as her favorite part of the production, to which Porter agreed.
“We’re both senior theater majors, so we basically live in this hundred foot area of the [Hopkins Center],” Porter said. “Everything is so funny since last night when we couldn’t sleep and were writing these songs.”
Ashley Ulrich contributed reporting.
