The Spring Reading Series offers audience members an inside perspective of theatre work. The four-night event, which will run from April 27 to April 30, will feature first time readings for three of the four plays.
According to Professor Ellen Margolis, the theatre program tries to encourage current students and program graduates to think ambitiously about their playwriting. For this reason, Margolis offered two Pacific University graduates the opportunity to come back and hear the first readings of their plays at the Spring Reading Series.
“You learn a lot as a playwright the first time you hear something read with an audience,” Margolis said. “There’s so much information you get out of that experience.”
The first time readings of the plays will take place during the first three days of the event. “Dark Corners,” written by Pacific graduate Lindsay Partain, is a horror play about three loosely connected storylines involving young adults who begin to lose sleep and have horrifying experiences in the middle of the night.
“Dark Corners” will be read the first day of the event, April 27. “Dead Wives Club,” written by Pacific graduate Rebecca Allen, is about a young woman who investigates a man thought to have killed his former wives. In order to uncover the man’s secrets, the young woman must marry him, potentially putting her own life at risk. “Scenes and Songs,” by Margolis and Pacific graduate Stephanie Landtiser, is a musical based on stories Margolis loved as a child.
Margolis and Landtiser have been working on this piece since late fall of last year. The musical will be read on the third day of the event, April 28. The last reading, “Love Letters,” is an established play that will be read by Margolis and Austin Tichenor, a visiting guest artist in the theatre department this semester. Margolis met Tichenor in college and they have been friends since.
“It’s a play about a lifelong friendship of a man and a woman from childhood and we are old friends so we thought it would be fun to read that together,” Margolis said.
“Love Letters” will be read on Sunday, April 30. All four readings will be held in Teatro Barbara in Warner Hall and begin at 4:00 p.m. each day. Admission is free.
“The feeling of new play readings should be that everybody kind of feels like an insider,” Margolis said. “The fact that for three of the four plays, literally nobody has ever heard this material before. So we like the idea that it’s like ‘come be in our world for an afternoon.’”
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