Festival Name: Science Play Festival
Link to site: https://scienceplays.org/science-play-festival/
Host: Christopher Newport University (CNU)
Festival Type: Science Play Reading Festival
Festival Dates: End of January
Overview of Festival: The annual Science Play Festival at Christopher Newport University is a two-day event that celebrates science plays. Including keynote speakers,
Sponsors and Partners: Christopher Newport University’s Trible Library
Festival Team:
Denise Gillman – Artistic Director of the Science Play Festival, Professor of Directing and Dramatic Literature, Acting and Interdisciplinary course with Theater and Science
Mary Sellen – Producer and University Librarian
Anna Galanides – Associate Artistic Director
Shannon Farrow McNeely – Director and Actor
Danielle Hartman – Director
Stacy Kruml – Director and Actor
First Festival Date: January 31st, 2019
Festival History: Since CNU’s first Science Play Reading Festival premiere in January of 2019, the annual Science Play Festival has become a staple at the university. Bringing in students from all departments, faculty and staff, professors, and even outside theaters. The festival succeeds in exposing students, who might not be inclined to see a theatrical performance, to theatre and show how it can involve many disciplines.
2020 Season
Play Performed: Two Degrees
Playwright: Tira Palmquist
Genres: Drama
Synopsis: Emma Phelps is a paleoclimatologist, focusing on ice in Greenland. In drilling and studying ice core samples, she sees first hand the symptoms of our changing planet, which makes the need to act all the more crucial and urgent. In addition to her growing sense of urgency for the planet, Emma, as a recent widow, experiences grief that compounds itself with each passing month. Now she’s been asked to come to Washington D.C. to testify in a Senate Committee regarding climate change legislation, and in this intersection of science and politics, of politics and the personal, she finds more than just a little is breaking up under the strain of change.
(Synopsis provided by New Play Exchange)
Discipline: Environmental
Funders: Co-Production with The Coil Project
Play Performed: Dr. Frankenstein
Playwright: Selma Dimitrijevic
Genres: Drama
Synopsis: Victoria Frankenstein is a brilliant, visionary young woman. It’s an age of enlightenment, a time when old orders begin to crumble and everything seems possible. Provided of course, that you are an English-man. Women are not allowed to study medicine in England, so Victoria travels to Bavaria to fulfill her destiny and become Dr. Frankenstein. Victoria’s experiments lead her to very brink of human knowledge, the secret of life itself.
(Synopsis provided by Oberon Books)
Discipline: Chemistry
Funders: Trible Library and TheaterCNU
Play Performed:The Effect
Playwright: Lucy Prebble
Genres: Drama
Synopsis: Hearts racing. Minds reeling. Knees buckling. Connie and Tristan have palpable chemistry—or is it a side effect of a new antidepressant? They are volunteers in a clinical trial, but their sudden and illicit romance forces the supervising doctors to face off over the ethical consequences of their work. The Effect takes on our pill-popping culture with humor and scintillating drama.
(Synopsis provided by the Dramatist’s Play Service)
Discipline: Neuroscience
Funders: Trible Library and TheaterCNU
Previous Seasons Shows:
2019 :
Children by Lucy Kirkwood
Isaac’s Eye by Lucas Hnath
The How and the Why by Sara Treem
Links:
https://cal.cnu.edu/event/2nd_annaul_science_play_festival#.Xt_q-C-z3Uo
Entered by: Anna Galanides
Photo/Visual Research with citations:
Photos provided by CNU’s Science Play Festival’s marketing material
