Student Blog: Saying Yes to the Dress

Hello y’all! For the next couple of months, I’m shining a light on one of the coolest parts of UC San Diego’s theatre department. Every spring quarter features a culmination of artistry that brings grads and undergrads together from all theatrical disciplines: the Wagner New Play Festival. The engine that revs the festival to life is the cohort of MFA playwrights. Each of them spends fall and winter quarters working on a piece ahead of its world premiere production in the spring. We have five playwrights this year, so this article is the start of a five-part series where I’ll be sitting down for a conversation with each of them. I hope reading these will be half as much fun as I had putting this together. 

First up is Beth Hyland! A writer whose works have dazzled audiences all across the US, she’s currently in pre-production on her thesis show: Baby Shower Katie. This play dives into the friendship between Rebecca— who wants more than anything to be a mother— and Hannah, who could not be more opposed to that idea in her own life. Hyland finds herself at a moment in her life where several of her friends are approaching the crossroads of having a first child, which unavoidably causes big shifts in the lives of everyone around them, and so she wanted to take a deeper look into what she has coined “the bachelorette/wedding/baby shower industrial complex.” 

Pivotal moments like these in women’s lives have a markedly manufactured air about them, which is something that Hyland taps into when developing the irreverent, comedic side of Baby Shower Katie. She has noticed a lot of gendered imagery at these sorts of events that make her feel like they have “this surface that’s very pastel and cutesy, and underneath it, there’s this sort of ancient, sometimes terrifying experience that’s painted over with chicken salad sandwiches.” A great deal of societal pressure constricts the interwoven threads covered up by the glamorous pink exterior of a baby shower, and Hyland’s unraveling of them is nothing short of thrilling. 

Being the third and final fully-produced work of hers at UCSD, it completes a trilogy of sorts with Grippy Sock Vacation and Cancelina, which premiered in the spring of 2023 and 2024 respectively. Reflecting on this body of work, she says that her “major dramatic interest is women’s relationships with themselves and with each other.” It’s true that these three plays couldn’t be less alike in terms of thematic vehicles and immediate plot. However, all of them are in conversation with one another about this core dynamic. Whether in a tender two-hander about mental illness or a roller-coaster about a child star’s career crashing and burning, a Hyland play will hold up a magnifying glass to its women and examine the inner workings of their lives.  

It’s undeniable that her unique voice as a writer was characterized through her work and training in UCSD’s graduate playwriting program. She was drawn after finishing her undergraduate studies because of the sheer number of successful writers that all were UCSD alumni. Names like Lauren Yee and Vivian Barnes jumped out to her and built the excitement around creating new works and crossing the next bridge in her writing journey. On top of this, there was the allure of getting to learn from professors Naomi Iizuka and Deborah Stein. 

She remarks that “both of them are actively working and having a ton of success in both theater and film,” which became a match made in heaven with a program that only enrolls enough writers to count on one hand. Being one of only five playwrights here these last two years made her realize that receiving "such focused 1-on-1 attention from teachers like Naomi and Deborah is invaluable and magical and so impactful on [her] writing.”

Additionally, she speaks so highly of UCSD’s graduate program due in large part to what the WNPF offers. Getting to bring a new show to life annually was the single biggest draw because she’s learned from her career thus far that “producing theater teaches things that you can’t learn from a class, even from an incredible teacher.” A play takes on such a new life in the hands of a new group of actors and designers, particularly for relatively young groups of artists, and the gift of witnessing that new life evolving “[feels] like winning the lottery.”

Lastly, her advice to anyone considering the pursuit of a graduate degree in playwriting— but is still applicable to any realm in theater— is to put in as much time as necessary to find that perfect program. She likens it to the television show Say Yes to the Dress in that "you shouldn't try on a wedding dress that's outside your budget because you'll inevitably fall in love with it" and so she had to filter out programs that charged tuition, since never paying for an MFA in theater is one of the few things that can be universally agreed upon no matter what. So much about a program can be learned from what the alumni are doing now, whether that's experimental performance art or major regional theater, and it's up to you to discover the right path to where you want to be.

Thank you Beth for helping me open this series, and thank you for reading! Stay tuned for the next installment, in which I'll be chatting with Mylan Gray.