To get a break in showbiz, you could work your connections. After all, your college roommate’s third cousin twice removed once delivered a no-fat soy latte to Gwyneth Paltrow’s personal assistant — no, wait, maybe it was his younger brother.
Or, you could win a berth in the Kennedy Center’s annual College Theater Festival (KCACTF), which runs Monday to April 18. Celebrating its 36th year, the festival is known for giving college students a leg up in the entertainment business.
The KCACTF involves more than 20,000 students and more than 1,200 student productions from colleges and universities nationwide. The participants in this year’s festival were selected from eight regional festivals held this winter. “I am on the road the first eight weeks of the year,” says Gregg Henry, artistic director. “This year, I saw 74 college productions from all across the country.”
The festival has three components: the staging of invited productions; scholarships and awards for acting, design, playwriting and dramatic criticism; and the 10-minute play festival. “The kids don’t have any time to see the monuments,” Mr. Henry says. “They hit the ground running. They see the festival as a huge audition, and the theater community views it as a way to scout new talent. We really have a who’s who in contemporary theater — Nilo Cruz, Eric Schaeffer, Michael LaChuisa, John Strand — who come in to teach master classes and workshops.”
Need proof? The festival launched the careers of “Friends” creators Marta Kaufman and David Crane, who presented their play “Personals” in 1980 while they were still students at Brandeis University.
“We want to expose the kids to the professionals as much as possible,” says Derek Gordon, senior vice president at the Kennedy Center. “The festival is intensely focused on bridging the students’ academic life with a working life after graduation. It is a unique way in which a field nurtures its own future.”
The Kennedy Center was a bridge to Broadway for Eliam Kraiem, whose play “Sixteen Wounded” debuts at New York’s Walter Kerr Theatre on Thursday, starring Judd Hirsch. The play first gained notice at the 1997 festival, winning the playwright a Fourth Freedom Forum Award with its $5,000 in prize money and a trip to the Sundance Theater Lab.
“It’s a play about a Palestinian radical who is hurled through a bakery window,” says Mr. Kraiem, 30. “The bakery belongs to Hans, a Holocaust survivor. The two form a friendship, and when the radical is called back to his past mission, he must make a decision about whether or not to continue the violence.”
Mr. Kraiem says that if it weren’t for the Kennedy Center, he never would have gotten to Sundance or to Broadway. “It was very surprising to get the award, and it made me feel like a writer.” Which he almost was not. Mr. Kraiem was languidly studying acting at Cal Arts and was about to get kicked out for what he terms “my attitude. A teacher intervened and said that I should stay on, but in the writing program. So I credit him for his good eye, since I never acted once.”
Another playwright hoping that the festival will launch his career is Marquette University graduate Garrett Zuercher, whose senior thesis, “Quid Pro Quo,” is one of six invited productions and the recipient of the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award as well as the John Cauble Award for Best Short Play.
“’Quid Pro Quo’ is primarily about how individuals, both deaf and hearing, can become caught between the deaf and hearing worlds and torn between the two sides,” says Mr. Zuercher. “I wanted to explore a personal issue close to me, since I am a deaf man.”
Mr. Zuercher was one of the first two deaf students ever to graduate from Marquette. “I knew I wanted to explore the theme of deafness in my play, but had no deaf actors to work with, since I was the only deaf person in the theater department,” he explains. “I had to find actors who could play the parts convincingly in sign language. I was lucky to find two amazing individuals — Colleen Foy and Michael Miro — and I wrote the characters specifically for them and to fit their American Sign Language [ASL] abilities.”
Mr. Zuercher worked on the play with ASL interpreters, which he said were more consultants than translators. “Since the play itself is signed, I didn’t require an interpreter to view rehearsals. And all the actors and crew needed to know ASL for the show,” he said. “As far as talking directly to the cast and crew, I speak with what can be called an accent, so everyone has become quite used to my voice, and they understand me without difficulty. But I take pride in the fact that the cast members sign when talking to each other, even if I am not included in the conversation.”
There are two voice actors in “Quid Pro Quo,” and it is with them that Mr. Zuercher relies on interpreters. “They act as my ears and tell me if the voices do not match the signed dialogue onstage. I ask them to show me through sign how the lines sound, and I decide if it is the right inflection, tone and manner. I also watch the voice actors’ faces, and I can tell what inflection and emotion they are giving the lines. After doing this show for a year, the voices and signs have become almost symbiotic — they practically breathe together as one character. It is an absolutely beautiful thing.”
WHAT: The 36th annual Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival
WHERE: Kennedy Center
WHEN: Monday to April 18
TICKETS: $5 to $15
PHONE: 202/416-8850
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