UT New Theatre festival brings together playwrights, directors and actors to present four new plays created by fine arts graduate students. Performances will be held Feb. 26 through March 8 at the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre and Laboratory Theatre. The Daily Texan compiled a list of plays to learn about their processes and performance times.
The only play written and directed by the same person, Chester Tsai’s “A Tale for Home” tells the story of two young girls discovering the importance of home. Set on an island far from America, the 10-year-olds, Lynn and May, uncover complicated realities with talking rabbits and a colony of ants that question what it means to call a place home. The play will be performed on Feb. 28 and March 5 at 7 p.m. and March 8 at 2 p.m. in the Laboratory Theatre.
“Theater is about the immediacy of direct experience and also living,” Tsai said. “When we are creating a story of the past in the theater, it creates a distance from our past memory, of the memories in this story. But at the same time, we create a new kind of direct experience, so we can capture what happened before, to us, in the form of storytelling.”
Reflecting on the current atmosphere of American politics, “Diet of Worms” takes a satirical look at the interactions between the ultra-wealthy and congressmen, tasked with raising money to pass a budget with a $487 quadrillion deficit. “Diet of Worms” will be performed on Feb. 28 at 2 p.m. and March 6 and 8 at 7 p.m. in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre.
“I ask the same of the audience — you are an active member of our ensemble,” director Rodolfo Robles Cruz said in the playbill. “I ask you to experience through rage, impulse and humor. I ask you to be like the white-tailed deer, the official state animal for eleven of our fifty U.S. states.”
Written and composed by Kaia Lyons and directed by Julia Kreutzer, “Ordinary Time” follows a group of monks searching for their missing brother. The audience will experience the play mostly in silence, exploring the concepts of faith and loyalty in religion. The play will be performed on Feb. 27 and March 4 at 7 p.m. and March 7 at 2 p.m. at the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre.
“The show is not only asking us to recontextualize our relationship with faith, but how we put our faith into action,” Kreutzer said. “Within the context of the monks, it’s not only thinking about how they put their faith and devotion into practice within the monastery, but also how the Catholic Church operates on a bigger scale.”
An Old Man asks his estranged son, Small Fry, to assist him in completing a sky burial in which vultures consume the dead, only to discover that only two vultures, Sampati and Jatayu, remain on Earth. Playwright Matt Thekkethala said “Vulturine” is a “father-son Home Depot trip from hell,” a story intertwined with dark comedy and commentary on climate change. Directed by Sunghyun Lim, the play will be performed on Feb. 26 and March 7 at 7 p.m. and on March 1 at 2 p.m. at the Laboratory Theatre.
“I became interested in (the questions of) ‘what would it be like to sit in hopelessness for just a moment?’” Thekkethala said. “‘What would it be like to truly imagine that our human experiment has led to several extinctions? What does it feel like to sit in the fact that we have done irreparable damage?’ (The play’s) a little dark, of course, but I think that’s important to feel.”
