Undergraduate students write plays based on Halloween themes, such as the death of a dessert, and will preform them Friday night.
The Student Organization of Undergraduate Playwrights will host a festive event Friday night aimed toward students who wish to have a calm evening before the Halloween Block Party uptown.
SOUP is hosting a night of short plays fitting the theme of “Trick-or-Treat” written by five different playwrights from SOUP, Brayden Frascone, the multimedia manager of SOUP and the producer of the show, said.
“People should come because it’s a quick and entertaining way to kick off Halloween weekend,” Luke Gamertsfelder, a junior studying playwriting and economics, said in an email.
He also said that because there are multiple plays written by different people, there should be something for everyone to enjoy.
“A lot of the people in our organization and a lot of our cast members and a lot of the people that come to our shows are people that aren’t really ‘block party’ type people,” Adrian Shelton, one of the co-presidents of SOUP, said. “Even if they are, it’s nice to be able to have an evening where you hang out with your friends, and you see art, and it’s really relaxed. … Students have a good night before the festivities on Saturday.”
Shelton, a senior studying playwriting, is one of the playwrights for the event and wrote a five-minute monologue about the murder of a chocolate cake.
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Gamertsfelder wrote a comedic sketch about two friends handing out candy at Halloween, he said in an email.
The plays will be acted out mostly by students from the School of Theater, and they weren’t required to audition for the parts because the event is more informal and focused on the writing aspect of the plays rather than the acting aspect, Frascone said. The actors don’t even have to memorize their lines, as they will perform with the scripts in their hands.
“We’ll ask our friends or people who we’d think would be really good in the parts,” Frascone said.
SOUP members are mostly students from the Bachelor of Fine Arts playwriting program, but any student with an interest in playwriting is able to join, Frascone, a sophomore studying screenwriting and playwriting, said. The members of the group provide inspiration and critique of their fellow members’ work, and they are given several event opportunities to showcase their writing outside of a classroom setting, he said.
Shelton said since other students in the BFA program generally get to work on shows put on throughout the year, SOUP has helped the playwright majors create their own opportunity for their work to be seen by the public.
“As undergraduate playwrights, we don’t really have that many opportunities to perform or to get our work out there,” Frascone said. “It is a good event to see what’s going on with the young generation of playwrights that is up and coming.”
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