For its first show of the semester, the undergraduate playwright organization SOUP is tackling horror plays. See the show Friday in the Hahne Theater at 7 p.m.
At the beginning of Spring Semester, it seemed as if there would not be any opportunities for SOUP, the Student Organization of Undergraduate Playwrights, to produce its plays.
With the final two main stage shows, lab shows and the graduate playwright festival, performance spaces were basically booked for the spring.
“Spring is so busy and the Division of Theater doesn’t have enough spaces to give everybody a chance to get their work done,” said Erin Baker, the president of SOUP who has made it her goal to increase SOUP’s presence on campus. “Even if I had started earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered because these are things scheduled a year in advance.”
Luckily, Baker said Charles Smith, distinguished professor of playwriting, allowed them to use the Hahne Theater before the Master of Fine Arts playwrights’ weekly show, Midnight Madness.
SOUP will present its first show of this semester, Killer SOUP: A Night of Horror Plays, Friday in the Hahne Theater at 7 p.m.
The idea to do horror plays came out of a conversation with Matthew Cornish, assistant professor of theater history, Baker said, about how horror movies began as horror plays.
“We thought it would be an interesting challenge to see how you create that suspense on stage and how can we do that in such a different environment,” said Baker, a senior studying playwriting. “In movies, they have techniques to create that scariness and suspense. We’re figuring out how to do that on a theater stage.”
It also just so happens that the show is performed on Friday the 13th. Killer SOUP will also take place just before Bible Madness, something the group finds funny because of the stark difference in subject material.
From slasher films to exorcism to dark comedy films such as Fargo, the horror genre is vast in its scope.
For his first SOUP show, Brayden Frascone, a freshman studying media arts, chose to do a more serious horror piece called Red Paint. He said his play is a mix of revenge and “an art project gone wrong” that involves a sinister monologue of a murderer talking to his victim.
On the other hand, that broad definition of horror is what led to alumnae Hope Wondowsky and Connor Baker’s play, which is about mummies trying to fill their “spook” quota on Friday the 13th.
“Connor and I, we’re used to writing comedies. So to have to write horror, it was cool just to flip that on its head and make it into our style,” Wondowsky said.
Jessica Walters, a junior studying playwriting, mixes her usual style of comedic writing with a more shocking conclusion in her piece Jesus is My Boyfriend and Whitney Houston is God. In the play, high school girls perform a séance, which involves the “I Want to Dance With Somebody” artist, to become more popular.
@buzzlightmeryl
mg986611@ohio.edu
