Provocative Original Theater Highlights convergence-continuum Festival

Thu 2/9-Sat 2/18 @ 8PM

Entering its sixth year, convergence-continuum’s 2017 Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) Playwrights Festival continues to showcase tomorrow’s dramatists.

This year’s affair – February 9-18 at Cleveland’s Liminis Theater — features the world premiere of full-length plays by local graduate-student playwrights: The Darkness by Katie Wallace, Renee Schilling and Rob Daniels, and Sexual Politics by JC Cifranic.

The former is a dark journey through a circus, suburbia and a sinister office building (with Phil Collins music somehow playing a key role), while the latter is modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

CoolCleveland talked to convergence-continuum artistic director Clyde Simon about the unique festival and special news regarding Tremont’s Liminis Theater.

What’s the origin of the NEOMFA Playwrights Festival?

It’s part of our academic outreaching and commitment to produce plays from grad students in the playwriting program. The whole creative writing program is a consortium of four state universities: Cleveland State, Kent State, Akron and Youngstown. Each one has their special unit — fiction, poetry, etc. — but the playwright’s unit is centered at Cleveland State, and that’s who we work with mostly. So we’re very interested in helping to nurture them. Because we’re now producing a lot more original works from playwrights in the area, mostly from Cleveland, the program is of mutual benefit.

What makes the festival so special?

What changes are the grad students involved every year. It’s the kind of opportunity that is pretty unusual that they get to do their thesis production fully mounted by a professional group, rather than a student production where you have a 60-year-old character played by a 20-year-old student actor. There’s a lot of effort to make their plays have the same professional mounting as any other play we would do. Then there’s feedback sessions afterwards for the benefit of the playwrights.

Tell us a little bit about The Darkness and Sexual Politics.

The Darkness is a very strange play in that Mike Geither, the professor in charge of playwriting, told three playwrights — I think all second-year grad students — in the program to each write one section independently. He gave them some guidelines for what that would be and then they’d get together and stitch it together. It turns out to be this real interesting mash-up but it does have a through line. It’s the journey of one character through what has become a very surreal world.

Apparently, that’s a surreal world that includes Phil Collins songs.

Oh, yeah, they do, and it looks at really the state of our current culture, which is in great flux right now.

And what about Sexual Politics?

It’s a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and it’s looking at government interfering with the private lives of individuals and how the characters try to work around that.

On face value, it appears both productions will make you think.

That’s part of our mission. Mike Geither knows that’s what convergence-continuum does. Keep that in mind. These plays are very much provocative, thought-provoking and entertaining.

Congratulations on the convergence-continuum fundraising efforts. Can you tell us about the company’s latest news?

We had a fundraiser this last year and we met our goal. Actually, we just closed on the purchase of the building. So the theater company will own the theater. It really secures our place in the community in the theater that has been our home since the beginning. Now, we didn’t meet the total goal yet, but we met enough to buy the building. We’re still continuing this year to raise a reserve fund for further improvements and modifications to the building.

convergence-continuum

[Written by John Benson]

Cleveland, OH 44113

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