Student Blog: My Week at the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival 2024

In the final weeks of May, I got the pleasure of being on staff for the 2024 Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival. I look forward to this festival every year, it is one of the highlights of my summer, and I could not have been more grateful to have been on staff for it this year. The week was filled with so many laughs and so so much new work. I absolutely love getting to talk about new plays and watch them grow, and Lanford is the perfect place to do it. 

What is The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival you may be wondering? Don’t worry, I will tell ya! This festival is a week long festival that takes place at my college, the Dobbins Conservatory for Theatre and Dance. The festival “will feature staged readings of five Official Selection full-length plays and ten Official Selection short plays, as well as workshops and seminars on playwriting and new play development. After the festival, one full-length play will be selected for the festival’s top prize and will receive its world premiere in the 2024-2025 Dobbins Conservatory Mainstage Season and will be considered for publication by Concord Theatricals” (pulled from the festival’s website).

This year I was the Volunteer Staff Manager. What my role was on staff was to assign our student volunteer staff jobs that needed to be done to help make the festival run. Our Dobbins Conservatory students are able to attend the festival for free and they also become apart of our volunteer staff and will have jobs to do throughout the week. Things like being usher for readings or sessions, or helping at the registration desk. Things like that are a big help in making the festival run smoothly. My amazing partner and I, Lindsay McLaughlin, helped assign students jobs and made sure none of them conflicted with anything else the students were participating in and we also helped out with a few other things of that nature throughout the week. I really liked this role on staff and I had a blast getting to work closely with Lindsay. We became very in sync throughout the week and I’m very grateful for her.

I still can’t stop yapping about how great this festival is, so strap in folks, while I take you through my week and experience at the Lanford New American Play Festival.

Week One: Prepping for the festival

I got back into good ole Cape Girardeau on Sunday, May 19th, and the Festival student organizing staff began preparations for the festival the next day! Throughout this week before the festival, the whole organizing staff was all hands on deck getting things ready for the festival. We had a running task list of things that needed to be completed and we would each just start getting things done. Things like making all of the name tags and lanyards, getting everyone's binders ready to go, making sure each space had everything needed for sessions and readings, and other things of that nature. It was a lot of fun getting to spend the week together and working together. We laughed a lot while getting things done and I’m grateful for having gotten to spend the week with everyone, especially the seniors that were graduating. Some of the people on staff, I had never gotten to work with, and it was great to get an opportunity to do so. Our last day of preparations was on Saturday, the day before the festival began, and we all just did last looks at spaces, making sure they were all clean, set up and ready to go. We had one final staff meeting with our wonderful artistic director, Kitt Lavoie, and then we were sent home to rest up for the week ahead.

Festival Week Day 1: Sunday, May 26th

We all arrived bright and early to campus to start finishing setting up for the festival. This morning was all about doing finishing touches on getting the campus festival ready. What I did in the morning was I helped set up dorm rooms, and I also helped get the dorm room keys ready to distribute to students staying on campus. I spent the rest of the morning at the registration desk helping check people in when needed. Then it was time for our opening staff meeting! This was an introduction for all volunteer student staff just about what the festival would entail, what kind of jobs they would be helping out with, and a basic overview of what the week would look like. After that, we had a little break before we had a mini rehearsal for the reading of short plays that was taking place that night. After that, it was time for our pizza dinner! This was a chance for all the festival participants to talk and say hi, and also our chance to get to talk and meet the guest artists and playwrights for the first time. It was great to see everyone and get to catch up for a bit. Before I knew it, it was time for the first set of short play readings! I was very grateful to be in Erica Furgiuele’s beautiful play “Good Night Sky.” The reading was directed by Josh Neighbors and Miko Hare was my co-actor in the reading. I had a blast getting to be a part of this reading. I loved getting to work with Josh and Miko, they are both wonderful artists. We also had the pleasure of getting to meet Erica and she got to attend the festival and watch the reading of her play. She is a wonderful human and I’m so grateful to have met her and talked to her. After that, the day was wrapped! It was time to head home and get ready for the next day, which is the first official day of the festival.

Day 2: Monday, May 27th

Today, I started the day working the registration desk this morning before the festival, and I also got to help out for the first little bit of the rehearsal for the first full-length play reading of the festival, which was really cool. Then it was time for the opening ceremony! At the opening ceremony, we got to hear a bit more about the history of the festival and how it got started from Kitt, our artistic director. We also got to hear from the executive director of the festival, Kenneth Lee Stilson. Then we got a basic overview of what the week would look like. Then we were dismissed to go to lunch before our first workshop! 

After lunch, it was time for a playwrights lab: the twenty-minute playwriting challenge. Participants had 20 minutes to write a short play. They were given an object to base their play off of, and the play could only involve two characters and had to take place in a single location. After the twenty minutes are up, the plays are then performed by actors chosen by the playwrights and we all get to watch and talk about them.  I always love this challenge because it is so cool to see what people come up with and it is also really neat to see people who have never written a play before get to watch their work done. A lot of people have since started writing plays because of this challenge and I love that so much. After that, our next and final session of the day was Using the Principles of Scenography in the Design Element of New Plays with Kathy Voecks. Kathy taught us a lot about the history of how different theater’s were set up and about how to use theater spaces unconventionally. We were given the opportunity to play around with different places to place the audience. She gave some students an open scene, and they got to and decided where the audience would sit when presenting their scene. Some of them had us audience members standing on stage with them, and others had us seated all around them. It was really cool to see how changing something like where the audience was positioned changed a lot about what the piece meant. After we took a dinner break, it was time for our first full-length staged reading! First up was “A List of Happenings at 1016 14th Street (Not Necessarily in Chronological Order)” written by Anna Watts. The reading was so cool to see. Anna wrote the play based off of a piece of paper she had found with list of happenings that her aunt had written down about her time living at 1016 14th street. After the reading we got to listen to a talk back from Anna and it was really interesting to hear about how she pulled inspiration from the list. After the talk back, I got to attend the informal reception after the reading with the cast of the reading and all the playwrights and guest artists. It was great to get to chat with everyone about the play and it was a great way to end the night! 

Day 3: Tuesday, May 28th

Tuesday morning began with another playwrights lab, where selected participants got to share 3-7 pages of a play they had been working on, hear it read out loud by actors, and then also be given feedback and hear how their material read to the audience. This is probably one of my favorite of the playwright labs. It’s really interesting to hear some of the work that people are working on. I always leave wanting to go write more plays myself.  I love talking about new plays and getting to watch new plays come to life. After that, we shifted gears to a session with voice-actor and playwright Steve Apostolina called Voice-acting in Film and Television. This session was so so cool. Steve talked to us just about things he has learned in the industry throughout his career and gave us little nuggets of advice and wisdom. He then told us about the movies he’s worked on, including Bullet Train with Brad Pitt. We then go to also try voice acting and do different exercises with him.I’ll never forget it. After lunch, we started the afternoon with Dnd! Directors in Development with Mikael Burke. His sessions were all about directing, and directing new work and staged readings. I’m very interested in directing, especially new work, in the future, so I found this session really helpful. After this I hung around to help set up a space for a session tomorrow. Then it was time for dinner and another staged reading! Tonight’s was Strange Birds written by E.M. Lewis. Lewis’ play was more on the horror/crime side of things, which was really cool to see played out on stage. It was great to hear her talk about how she wrote the play and portrayed certain magical aspects on stage. After that, it was time for the informal reception, then I headed home to get some rest for tomorrow!

Day 4: Wednesday, May 29th

Today, we started off the day with a featured stage reading of Firehawks by Emily Bohannon which was so special. This is a play that she presented some pages of at the playwrights lab at the festival a few years ago, and she had recently done a workshop production of it in New York. She very graciously let us do a reading of it and came back to the festival. It was fascinating to see the fully developed play and to hear how it has grown since when she first started working on it. After that, we had a little talkback with Emily and Kitt about Adding Value to a Room: What Playwrights and Actors look for in the New Play Development Process. As an actor, I found this session really helpful and it taught me a lot about not only how to be an actor in a new work but also how to be helpful to the playwright in the room as well. After lunch, we had a session led by E.M. Lewis and she talked more about Making Theatre Magic! She showed us how to incorporate different types of magic into plays and we also got to do a little writing ourselves involving magic. I’ve never written anything magical before, so it was great to have an opportunity to explore that. After that session, we did one with Anna Waats called Found Texts: Finding the Story in Existing Text. Anna gave us each different pre-existing texts to then examine, research, and then write a few pages of a play about. Some people had letters to santa from kids, others had government documents. Mine was a church bulletin from St. Mary’s College which was really cool. She also taught us how to turn found texts into stories. I liked this session a lot and I also really liked the pages I wrote. After this, I helped tear down Anna’s session and set up for tomorrow’s session. Then it was dinner, and time for the reading of Girlhood by Ida Esmaelia. This show is all about what it is like to be a teenage girl in high school and some of the struggles during that time period of life. It was cool to hear how Ida also talked about how she incorporated her own experiences into her show and why she formatted her script the way she did, and her process overall. After that and the informal reception, I headed to bed.

Day 5: Thursday, May 30th

Thursday, we kicked off with a sessions from the wonderful Rachel Levens, the Aquisitions and Artistic Development Associate for Concord Theatricals who taught us all about Shelf Help: Getting Plays Into Your Script Library. She taught us how to find new plays and what her job is and she also raffled off some Concord Titles. This was a really fun session and Rachel also gave us some really cool Concord Merch that I love hehe. After that, it was time for “title” of session…(not a mistake, that’s really the title of Robb’s session) with playwright Robb Willoughby. Robb told us his story and what his career journey was like. He was the human actor for Disney’s Aladdin that animators used to base the animations off of. That was really cool to hear him talk about. His career is really cool and really inspiring as well. It was a great session. After our lunch break, it was time for New Play Development Jeopardy. I got to be on one of the teams which I was so excited about. This version of jeopardy involved trivia about all types of theatre and some random categories as well, my favorite being puppet or human where we were given a character in a musical and we had to determine if it was originally played by a puppet or a human. I’m proud to say that our team won. After that we had a session with Timothy Davis about Making Text Based Choices. Tim Davis was the teacher of my Auditioning class over zoom so it was really great to get to meet him and get to work with him in person. His session was about how to make choices quickly when given new material. After that, I helped switch over the room for tomorrow morning's session and then I got dinner before it was time for another official selected stage reading. Tonight’s reading was Dead Girls Club by Sarah Elizabeth Grace. This play was based on a true story about girls in Detroit in the 1970’s who went missing. The play took place in the afterlife where they played dungeons and dragons while telling the story of their lives. It was really interesting to hear Sarah talk about how she took the true story and incorporated it into her play. After that I went to the informal reception and then headed off to bed to prepare for the final full day of the festival.

Day 5: Friday, May 31st

Today, I was super excited for because it was time for the staged reading that I got to be apart of. I was super fortunate to be in Can’t Stop the WROK! By Robb Willoughby. This play was about three high schoolers in the 80’s trying to save their schools radio station. I had the pleasure of playing Emma, the chief runner of WROK, the school’s radio station. We started off the morning in rehearsal, figuring out the blocking for the piece and also really diving into the text and making sure we hit all the intended thoughts, beats, and things like that. Our reading was directed by Timothy Davis. It was super great to get to work with both Robb and Tim. They are great artists and created a great working environment. After that we took a lunch break, and headed into the theater space where the reading was at, and we ran through the play and tweaked a few things here and there. After that, I met my mom for dinner. She came into town to watch the reading which I was really grateful for. After that it was time for the reading! I was really really excited about this one. I got there early to get my mic put on and for a sound check. Before I knew it the doors were open and it was time for the reading! It went super well, the audience was really responsive and loved all the jokes. The talk back with Robb after was really great as well and the reception was a blast. I really loved this script. It was super funny, yet still had some really great moments of vulnerability to play around with. It was a blessing to get to be a part of bringing it to life. 

Day 6: Saturday, June 1st

This was the last day of the festival. The line up for today was rehearsal for our last selection of short play readings, the presentation of the short play readings, then finally, the closing ceremony of the festival. I got the pleasure of directing Safe Walk by Rebecca Kane, so I started off my day in the rehearsal room with my two actors and rehearsal assistant. This was a really great piece to work on and I was really excited to get to work with everyone. After rehearsal, I went home and got dressed for the final readings and the ceremony. Then I headed back to campus for the final selection of short plays. I love short plays a lot. I think it is super cool how you can tell a whole story in only 10 pages, so I always love getting to hear all the different stories in the short play programs. After the readings were over, we got to do a talkback with a few of our short playwrights and ask them questions which was great to get to talk to them. After that it was time for the closing ceremony. The closing ceremony started with a panel with all five of our full length playwrights where we got to hear more about their own careers and they also offered us advice on writing plays. After that, it was time for the awards ceremony portion. This is when the playwrights receive their awards for being apart of the festival and also the recipient of the top prize of the festival is announced. This years winner was Girlhood by Ida Esmaeli! This means that our schools will be putting on the world premiere of the play in the spring. I’m super excited about this one and I cannot wait to see it come to life! In addition to this, Kitt also announced the next year festival’s associate artistic director and associate executive director and I was so so excited to be selected as the associate executive director for next year’s festival. I love this festival a lot, and I’m really thrilled to be able to take on this position and continue to be a part of it. Then we were all dismissed and that concluded the 2024 Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival! The following day, the student volunteer staff met up to clean the campus and return it back to it’s normal set up, but after that we were all dismissed and that was about it.

That was my experience at this year’s festival! I love this festival so much and I’m so glad to have been apart of it again this year. I always leave feeling so inspired and creatively charged. It is truly a huge blessing and I am so lucky to go to a school where we are encouraged to take part in new work and we are given the opportunities to learn about many different aspects of our industry, and the Lanford Wilson Festival helps us do just that. Til next year!

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