New Play Festival chance for actors, directors to be involved in play workshops

Christiana Molldrem directs “Psycho and Soma,” a play by Anna Gilchrist for the New Play Festival… “Psycho and Soma” by Anna Gilchrist

Directed by Christiana Molldrem

“One Act” by Matt Russak

Directed by Dave Bisaha

Wednesday-Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.

Studio Theatre

www.play.pitt.edu

Christiana Molldrem directs “Psycho and Soma,” a play by Anna Gilchrist for the New Play Festival, an event that allows students to showcase one act of a play they’ve written. Molldrem, a theatre and performance masters student at Pitt, has directed more than 10 plays and was selected by theatre arts faculty member Cathy George, who has served as an adviser for the production.

During the fall, writers and students workshopped the plays currently showing in the festival. The Pitt News was able to talk with Molldrem about her experiences directing “Psycho and Soma.”

The Pitt News: Can you tell me what the show is about?

Christiana Molldrem: “Pycho and Soma” is about Grace … Grace is on the eve of her graduation ceremony from college, and she’s valedictorian, so she’s working on her speech that she’s going to give and what she wants to say to all these people she might not see again. And while she’s thinking about that, her imaginary lion shows up, and she suffers from some psychosomatic symptoms … and they take her through all the things that started her psychosomatic symptoms in the first place. And it deals with body issues in relationships.

TPN: How was working with the playwright as a director?

CM: It’s an interesting process, I really enjoyed the fall workshop period because the play I’m working on, “Psycho and Soma,” has had some revisions since the fall. It’s interesting to see how it gets shaped and how things in the play becomes clearer … [and how the playwright] works out the best way to tell the story.

TPN: How did the workshops work?

CM: So, in the fall in the class, the show had two weeks of workshop. So there’s five shows, and we went through them all week by week. There was a group of students, and the directors would come in as well — who aren’t necessarily the people in the shows now — and they would come in and play the roles.

TPN: What was your role in workshopping?

CM: Well, one of the things that happened during the workshop is there’s this great imaginary lion character. He’s a sort of super flamboyant magical lion, who’s sort of the main character’s imaginary friend. And he wasn’t super developed in the beginning, so one of the things I suggested in workshopping was to make him sort of a ringmaster character who moves the plot along … It has been very useful during rehearsals to have that character.

… Anna, the playwright, she would take recommendations from anyone. She was very responsive and listened a lot during the workshop period, which allowed for these big changes in the script very quickly.

TPN: How has the play changed as you directed?

CM: This particular script has been fairly static as we’ve moved through the rehearsal process. Stable would be a better word than static … It’s a memory play, so we go in and out of real time and memory time. That’s been interesting to deal with.

TPN: What have been some of the difficulties of directing this show?

CM: The difficulty is that — [and] this is for almost every play — you get into a time crunch. … in the time crunch of a new script, sometimes you find inconsistencies … but there isn’t time to go back and fix it and deal with it. That’s the most frustrating part of this process is there isn’t enough time to go back.

… [Also], we don’t have much of a budget to put on the show. Normally, labs get money from the theater department [and] we’re splitting that between five shows. We’re very much on shoestring budget. It requires a certain amount of creativity to get around. You can’t do a certain number of spotlights because one show needs two. But I think that can be good for the creative process. It forces you to be more creative when you’re staging.

TPN: What have you learned from working on this show?

I’ve learned a little bit more for this fest, better ways to sort it out and be more organized, because it’s difficult coming in right off of break right after last semester because we don’t get a very long break. In the second weeks of productions, we’re even more crammed for time getting into studio space. So I have some better ideas about how I would do this differently in the future to ease this process for everybody.