Special Events
In addition to our mainstage shows, the Department of Theater frequently hosts special events that allow students to see art and interact with artists making a difference in their field.
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The Brink of Us
by Delaney Britt Brewer
Directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni
Studio 204
April 2 at 7 p.m.
Admission is free
Let us know you're coming on our Facebook event page
The world of theater is one of connection and collaboration — and the Department of Theater strives to offer its students frequent opportunities to hook into that network. On April 2, guest lecturer Kara-Lynn Vaeni will bring her friend and collaborator, Delaney Britt Brewer, to campus to stage a reading of one of her plays. Brewer, an up-and-coming playwright whose work has received notice from the New York Times, will be on hand to work with students on this staged reading of her piece The Brink of Us.
The play is about one man's search for the truth about his sister's death. One year ago, Elliot's sister Annie died in a cabin upstate. Since then, the deer in that part of the woods have somehow grown ever larger. Elliot asks his old college friends to meet him there to honor the anniversary of her death. The police said suicide, but Elliot knows it was murder — and so does one of his friends. Elliot wants to find out which friend.
In addition to the performance, the department will open elements of the production process up to students and the community via open rehearsals and talks with the playwright. Please check the Department of Theater's facebook page for details on these events.
About the playwright: Delaney Britt Brewer is a New York Times-recognized writer & performer, living in New York. Of her most recent work, the Times wrote, "The young playwright Delaney Britt Brewer has created an intricately woven, emotionally chilly drama about the pain of approaching 30 in New York. It's a puzzle of a piece, and ... Ms. Brewer will be a player to watch."
The Brink of Us At UMASS
Post by Delaney Britt Brewer
The Brink of Us is a play I've been developing for the past three years. I started writing the piece in a workshop I took with Jon Robin Baitz. I began only with an idea of having multiple characters who stay in the same location, and I wanted that location to become a sort of character of its own. The premise was then hatched that 8 former college friends who'd all but one attended Bard together would be shut in a log cabin upstate due to an extreme snow storm and one more seriously supernatural element: an overpopulation of large and predatory deer.
I tend to work backwards as a playwright, and it lends itself to exciting, messy, and sometimes confusing circumstances. I rarely start with a substantial plot, I start with ideas I want to flesh out. This time the biggest one was that of complicit behavior – moreover big lies that are buried by groups. I often find that if there's a big lie that has been buried, smaller lies can be found close by. The murder of the main character's sister and the mystery surrounding it is a plot device, but almost incidental to the other lies the characters tell each other on a regular basis. I find the little secrets and lies that fill our daily lives to be the most riveting. Do you secretly love your friend's wife? Do you covet their career? Did you always like that person or did you stomach them because they were in your circle of friends? These are bleak topics to uncover, but they rear their heads constantly. I think I was (and am) more fascinated with delving into the darker side of humanity, but doing so with moments of levity and wit.
Kara-Lynn(Vaeni, the director of the piece and a lecturer at UMass this semester) has been vital to my development of this piece. As soon as she read an early draft and responded to the piece, I knew we had a strong connection artistically. She read the piece in its earliest and roughest stage, and from that knew exactly what I wanted to do with the play. That's a rare thing for a writer to find someone who can find the diamonds in the rough while not simply dismissing it as rough. We work shopped the play with a group of fantastic actors through New Georges, a theater company for which she is the literary manager. After that, I wrote another draft of the play. Last Fall, we developed the play even more through a company called On The Square Productions, and ended up with a whole new cast and I was able to see the play from a different light with further interpretation. From that reading we made some serious and necessary cuts and changes to the play. I am so excited to be able to bring this play to UMASS Amherst.
I think the piece has a certain amount of raw emotion and bravery that is sometimes scary to professional actors in New York, but is far more thrilling to students who are in an environment established to take risks. Also, there is a kind of kinetic energy needed for an ensemble piece about old friends that can only really be felt between people who have been working closely together over an extended period of time. It's nearly impossible to have that kind of intimacy already in place with actors who may not know each other and only have a few weeks of rehearsal time. But, in a college setting, that intimacy is immediate. I think this workshop is going to be a dynamic and thrilling experience, and I can't wait to see the outcome.
