Festival to feature student playwrights

"You can't hear enough about beauty these days," observed Paul Griffin, whose play, "My Eros," will be featured in Theatre Intime's upcoming Student Playwright Festival. "Beauty was pushed out of art for a while — a lot of art was experimental, like atonal music, but now beauty is re-emerging."

But what is beauty? The three plays of the Student Playwright Festival, "My Eros" and two others by Zachary Pincus-Roth '02 titled "The Short Sock Theory" and "There Are No Bombs and Mines Here," share a theme of the quest for beauty. Over the course of the three short plays, characters philosophize on beauty, find beauty in love and in each other. They finally challenge the audience to question what is beautiful in their own lives.

"The Short Sock Theory" is Pincus-Roth's creative spin off a dialogue he engaged in last summer. It was inspired when he first noticed a startling correlation between sock height and social stereotypes.

"I was a counselor at a computer camp and I started having a lot of conversations with friends about short socks," said Pincus-Roth. He said he wrote the play shortly afterward, exploring the relationship in a collegiate setting. When asked whether he personally wore long or short socks, Pincus-Roth replied, "I switched to shorter socks at the end of last summer."

The second play, called by its director Sarah Rodriguez "a strange interlude in the void between the first and third plays," is Pincus-Roth's "very loose" adaptation of a scene from the English Patient, evolved from an assignment for a class last spring.

"One thing I learned in the class was how much freedom you have in adaptation," said the playwright. "At first I was unconsciously making fun of the English Patient, but then it became about theater, exploring how actors and actresses interact with each other and with the tech crew."

"It's about an actor and an actress discovering who they are, as though they were standing backstage and someone whispered to them their parts and pushed them out onstage. It's very abstract," Rodriguez agreed.

The third and longest play, "My Eros," presents elements of sex, beauty and love couched in three distinct scenes — all onstage at once — with no specific plot and no interaction between the scenes. The ideas represented are traditional marital love, portrayed by a couple sharing an intimate bedroom scene; the idea of "free love" found backstage at a rock concert, where the interplay of music and eroticism electrifies the air; and an equally charged philosophical discussion between a professor and student, exploring Plato's ideas on beauty.

The play "endeavors to show how our taste in beauty determines how we live, and creates the grand world vision that influences us," said Griffin. It invites the viewer to respond and understand what he feels is beautiful. Andrew Garland, who "specializes in avant-garde theater," brings new perspectives to Griffin's vision as the play's director.

To find out why Pincus-Roth switched socks or to sample vignettes of other students' visions of beauty, check out the Student Playwright Festival May 17-19 at 8:00 p.m. As always, the plays are written, directed, produced and performed entirely by students.