Theatre
The Gas Heart
A modern production of Tristan Tzara's 1920 Dada masterpiece, this was Jake Gonnella's senior directing thesis, exploring how a director maintains audience engagement when working with abstracted and non-narrative scripts. The Gas Heart featured a deconstruct-able set, which the actors moved throughout the show, heightened make up and costume reminiscent of the cubist design of the 1920s, and rapidly shifting lights and music, all designed to keep the audience entertained and awestruck.
EUGENE
EUGENE is an experimental short play about the absurdities of everyday life. It follows a young man, Eugene, as he navigates through college, relationships, and work. Plot is abstracted in EUGENE, as interwoven concepts and ideas appear and reappear, dealing with nostalgia, love, and human connection. Eugene, at college, finds himself distracted, constantly thinking of the past. Even when he meets someone who changes his life, he still cannot shake the thoughts in his head that draw him back. Driven by these thoughts, Eugene ends up with a desk job, his only solace the distant sound of dripping water.
20 Plays / 20 Days
An experimental staged reading of excerpts from Aziza Afzal's 20-day challenge in which the playwright wrote one short play every day. Like The Gas Heart, special attention was given to bringing the text to the forefront, while maintaining audience engagement with the spectacle of lights, sound, music, and projection.
Guenevere of States
A NU-DADA pseudo-Shakespeare play about a fictional queen and her struggles in the shadow of her predecessor, Guenevere combined absurdism, Shakespearean drama, and political commentary to create a piece that attempted to make sense of the bizarre world 2016 had ushered in.
Caligula
A portrait of the infamous third emperor of Rome, Gaius Caesar, better known as Caligula. This play portrays Caligula not as an insane tyrant, but as a young man at the mercy of forces far beyond his control, both personal and political. Nihilistic, eccentric, and charming, the man, not the monster, has his story told in Caligula.