For many graduate students, completing a thesis project is an act of passion. It is an endeavor that entails daunting amounts of work, but is ultimately a rewarding academic rite of passage. Six third-year graduate students in the University's Masters of Fine Arts Program have taken their projects to a new level. They currently are in the first stages of an ambitious project that challenges traditional notions of what a thesis can be.
These graduate students decided to stage their own play, building it entirely from the ground up, with limited faculty interaction. They are managing and running every aspect of the performance -- choosing the play, controlling the lighting, constructing the props, crafting the set and creating the costumes. The result is a unique production that, while demanding tremendous time commitment and devotion, has allowed the six students to experience every aspect involved in the production of a play and has helped each actor and actress to develop his or her fullest potential.
MFA degree aspirant and publicity head Maura Malloy offered multiple reasons she and her fellow colleagues felt the need to strike out on their own and come up with a non-conventional thesis proposal.
"The group we are working with is really close because we've all been together for the past two years in the MFA program," Malloy said. "We know each other inside out, and we have always been talking about doing something together in our final year. Despite the fact that we are in the same program, each one of us has different contributions and skills to contribute that make us such a well-balanced team."
Once Malloy and her five colleagues had determined their plan for an alternative thesis project, there was much work to be done. One of the biggest challenges was finding a play that had roles for each of the six students -- one with three male parts and three female parts. Faith Hurley, one of the six who will act in the play, as well as serve as a costume designer and publicity helper, said she believes that choosing the right play for the cast was one of the most daunting parts of the whole project.
"We spent most of our Spring Break last year searching for plays," Hurley said. "We searched the Web and read through so many plays, but it was difficult to find a play that had three male and female roles. Finally, I stumbled across this exciting play with equally weighted parts which none of us had either performed or seen performed before. Since the production is new to us, we knew that all the ideas that we came up with on how to stage the production would be original."
The group chose to perform "A Devil Inside" by David Lindsay-Abaire, which Malloy explained as a dark comedy that weaves the lives of six seemingly unrelated yet eccentric characters together.
Once the play was selected, the proposal still had to be approved by the drama department. Most students in this program undertake thesis projects in which they act in a production in the Culbreth Theater. But since every member of the group had previously acted in at least three of these productions, they decided that taking on a different sort of project would be the best plan.
For their proposal to pass the review board, the group had to have all their ideas carefully planned so that their play could be considered an appropriate route to take to fulfill their thesis requirements. Katie Liddicoat, a group member who serves as sound manager and prop designer, remembers all the hard work the group put forth while preparing to submit the proposal to the department.
We "had to write a formal proposal and meet with the heads of the department for approval," Liddicoat said. "We had to have everything in order for them to agree to let us work on the project and prove to them that we were ready to undertake the task."
The fact that the production is almost entirely student-run and operated is not the only unusual aspect of the performance. Each group member will rotate roles on a nightly basis, switching roles so that every male or female part will be performed by every actor and actress, respectively. So essentially, each student is memorizing, rehearsing and performing half of the play. Since the students would normally only have to remember their individual parts in any other performance, Malloy knew that this would be one of the biggest challenges during the time leading up to the production.
"Although our brains are in tune to memorizing, I worked on memorizing the play all through August," Malloy said. Memorizing "takes complete commitment. We have even been practicing longer than we normally would for a play. Usually rehearsals last for six weeks, but ours are running for eight weeks."
Finally, the students were ready to come together as a group and begin rehearsing and setting the stage for their big performance. Two fourth-year undergraduate theater majors joined the six graduate students in order to gain a stage managing credit during their last year in the department. Another graduate student in the MFA program is serving as the stage manager for the production. The combination of everyone's efforts made it possible for this group to make their independent project a staged reality.
Although the students are highly focused on their production, they also are thinking about what the future has in store of them as actors and actresses. Malloy sees her time spent in the MFA program as a stepping stone onto bigger theater projects.
"Right now, along with finishing up our third year here, we are also getting our resumes in order and scouting out regional theaters for opening slots," Malloy said. "The production that we are putting on is almost like running an independent theater because of the responsibility that we alone carry for the success of the production. I think that is something that I might be interested in doing eventually."
Other group members expressed interest in exploring opportunities in different areas of the country. Chris Cannon, a group member who serves as an actor and lighting manager, said he would like to try his luck with film projects if he does not continue to pursue a career in theater.
"I'm really interested in film, and I'm trying to concentrate on that now," Cannon said. "Right now I'm teaching a film class through the drama department. I think I'm going to try and find work in either L.A. or New York after this year in filmmaking, but I wouldn't mind doing theater again."
"A Devil Inside" began its run November 2 and will continue to show until November 14, for 12 performances in the Helms Theater.
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