Freshmen gain valuable theater experience from One-Act Festival at Intime

The second annual One-Act Festival (OAF), a trio of one-act plays acted, directed, designed and produced exclusively by freshmen, opens this weekend at Theatre~Intime. OAF was introduced at Intime last year as an effort to involve underclassmen in theater early in their Princeton careers.

In September, six candidates from the class of '05 applied to direct plays in the festival. The Theater~Intime board chose Matthew Lane, Andrew Jordan, and Melissa Galvez. They began by selecting plays from a pool of nine one-act scripts and then held auditions. Casting occurred in October and rehearsal began in November.

Matthew Lane directs Christopher Durang's popular "The Actor's Nightmare." It tells the story of hapless George, who finds himself suddenly onstage starring in a show for which he doesn't know the lines. The play intertwines characters and dialogue from "Hamlet" and Noel Coward's "Private Lives" with a Samuel Beckett-like sequence featuring monologues recited from the interiors of trash cans.

As George muddles through, madly improvising and pulling lines from the air, the play degenerates into what director Lane calls "a weird hallucination," and ends with a beheading.

"I've tried to play up the twisted elements," he said. Originally attracted to the play because of its lightness, he noted, "It's not emotionally demanding. It's a fun little one-act."

Andrew Jordan brings Lucille Fletcher's thriller "Sorry, Wrong Number" to Intime. Initially conceived as a radio play, then developed for the theater and the screen, "Sorry, Wrong Number" features a Hitchcockian premise. An invalid woman, home alone, accidentally intercepts a phone call and overhears the planning of a murder. Amid escalating tension and desperation, she tries to prevent it.

Jordan describes the play as "scary, but funny. I liked the fun, cinematic, B-movie early Hollywood flavor."

Timothy Mason's "Sorry," directed by Melissa Galvez, centers on a character named Pat, a woman in her mid-twenties living in New York City. The play tells what happens when she receives a visit from Wayne, a neighbor in her apartment building. The play opens, auspiciously enough, with Pat having just shot Wayne in the leg. From there, says Galvez, "it's a story of two people caught in an absurd situation who end up making a connection." Despite the shooting, she's quick to add that the play is a comedy.

All three plays are connected by a comic treatment of universal anxieties. "Each one-act plays on a little fear we all have, and makes it possible for us to laugh at our insecurities," Galvez says.

The comic tone of the plays is a change from last year's OAF, for which directors, instead of choosing their own scripts, received assignments. The plays were grim, featuring religious madness, street violence, and a strangling. This year's fare will be more cheerful.

The directors bring a variety of experience to Intime. Lane, a veteran actor, previously directed "The Woman in Black" at his high school. Galvez also directed and acted in high school and was featured in Intime's fall production of "The Shadow Box." Jordan has made short films, but this is his debut directing theater.

OAF's purpose is to welcome freshmen into a theater community where it can sometimes be hard to break in. Emma Worth, cast in "The Actor's Nightmare," commented, "After not getting into some of the first shows you try out for, something like this helps boost your confidence."

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Jordan enjoyed working with all freshmen: "It makes the process less intimidating."

Cara Marsh Sheffler '04, who directed last year, remembered OAF positively. "Getting authority as a freshman gives you no choice but to be assertive," she observed. "It was the best sort of learning experience."