In the Room: Student Workshop Festival

Producer - Spring 2022

In The Room is a new workshop series made by Williams College Theatre majors as a way to experiment with the many shapes and forms that theatre can take. At the workshop, our works include everything from stage combat, to a new musical about living with magical powers while under apartheid in Jerusalem, to a devised piece about queer relationships based on the work of ancient Greek poet, Sappho, and so much more!

Project Synopsis: 

Eddie Wolfson’ 23 will be using a physical and written devising process to collaboratively develop a piece based on Sappho’s work. The group of collaborators will be exploring queer longing/desire/and love by disidentifying with ancient text. Sappho’s work is beautiful and evocative and presents an opportunity to examine queerness and queer love today as a collaborative of young artists.

Fifty Feral Hogs, written by Maye McPhail ‘22.5, takes on familiar archetypes of queerness in rural Texas and asks what happens to the people who allow themselves to become defined by these overworn narratives. The play centers around Callie, a young queer woman who brings her partner home to her family’s ranch and must there locate the person she used to be in the context of the person she’s becoming. 

Area D, Lour Yasin ‘23 will be developing a musical that follows Laila, a 17 year old, who leads a normal life in Jerusalem working part-time for her family’s souvenir shop, if you could call having magical powers or living under apartheid “normal.” The play will explore the themes of segregation, racism, apartheid, and the use of brutal military force in a world that walks a tightrope between reality and fantasy. 

Elements of Violence: An Exploration, Mackenzie Grace ‘22 will choreograph a fight sequence and work with actors to showcase how the same basic fight structure can have different impacts on the audience when elements of it are modified. This project is an exploration of the ethics of the representation of violence, and seeks to answer the following question: How is the audience impacted by watching violence and when is making them do so justified? 

The Musical Theatre Song Workshop, directed by Chris van Liew ‘23, is a showcase of self-selected musical theatre performances that will be workshopped through a collaborative ensemble process. The group format along with the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process will help us test out new ideas and let us engage in dialogue with each other about our choices.

The Rosencrantz Finishing School by Tristan Whalen ‘23 is a solo performance loosely based on elements from Shakespeare’s Hamlet with influences from the writing and rhyme scheme of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Over the course of the piece, a young professor named Letham Dorigen retells the story of his father’s rise to (and tragic, meteoric fall from) the upper echelons of Theatre. 

Sparrows vs Magpies, directed by Dylan Nadelman ‘23, will involve the workshopping of a new play by Nina Kolman that deals with strained adolescent friendships. The play explores a group of teens grappling with changing social situations that can come from new romantic relationships, and the manifestation of years of suppressed emotions come to a head.