The 2024 Fall Festival: Out of Line featured four short student selected plays exploring themes of personal choices and their intersection with social norms and pressures.
Production Highlights:
Largest freshman cast & crew group since the pandemic.
First live musical since returning from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Featured staff member cameos.
Featured heavy audience interaction and incorporation into the performance.
Featured an original musical composition and performance by Emma McDonough.
Politricks
A Game
Brighter than Others
Marcy and the Sandwich: A Cafeteria Drama
Out of Line
An Anthology of Short, Student-Selected Plays
Hey, does that thing look crooked to you?
Yeah, it looks kinda dangerous.
Somebody had better push it up before it falls.
Up? Don't you mean somebody should push it down a little?
A funny, thought-provoking play about agreeing on what we see to be the problem, but arguing about exactly how to solve it. As characters persuade one another to take sides on the issue, they quickly lose sight of the original point of the disagreement. By the time this play reaches its turning point, both sides know only one thing: their opinions are good and right, and the other side is just out of their minds!
"This is my land. It is beautiful, and it is mine."
Every time the light comes on in the experiment room, three volunteer subjects must recite this simple sentence, each of them standing within a simple boundary marked on the floor to separate the space into three equal sections. From the observation room, Dr. Henning will collect data about how the game progresses. As it does, we see the strange and inexplicable drive for each person to possess first their own area, then more than their neighbors, and eventually, the philosophical space in the room as well. It's a play that begins with laughter and hilarious chaos, but ends deadly serious. How far each one will go to protect their own boundary lines?
Harrump has an extraordinary new discovery to share with civilization: constellations! But getting a new idea past a cave-era board parliamentarian and review committee isn't as easy as it seems it should be:
Grunk's just trying to keep everyone's attention.
Gronk won't let anything proceed unless protocols are perfect.
Grub finds the con to every pro.
Uggums is enthusiastic, but largely unhelpful.
Mongum aspires to be nothing but average, and can sometimes manage a stalemate while arguing with driftwood.
Walter is the self-appointed defender of truth and precision. Seriously, everything has to be exact to satisfy Walter.
What would a cave-era board meeting look like? Believe it or not, everyone's tangled up in trying to "mind" the red tape!
Marcy casually unpacks a lunch and insinuates that she may just bite her sandwich.
The audacity of some people! Marcy acts as if this life decision of hers wouldn't set off a chain of resulting events that would ripple through the cafeteria and wreak havoc on the natural order of things.
In this satirical comedy, Marcy's dilemma, to bite or not to bite, leaves nobody in neutral. Some people warn her against it, others eagerly vie for the best seats to watch her make her move, betting breaks out, the press covers the event, friends from all walks of life offer their passionate and unsolicited advice, Marcy's relationships dissolve, and she is left to choose. After the laughter subsides, audiences are left to consider who influences us, how they influence us, and whether, in the age of media saturation, it is still possible to make up our minds ourselves.