Every two years, Northern Kentucky University’s Theatre & Dance Department puts out a call for brand new plays to explore. It’s called the Y.E.S. Festival, so named because it’s a “year-end series.”
Festival co-director Mike King says the play-reading process for this year’s 18th series, which begins Thursday and lasts through April 30, started 11 months ago, with the goal of narrowing the list from 293 submissions to just two. “We looked not only at the quality of their writing but also at our ability to meet the requirements of the script,” King says via email.
This year, NKU was particularly interested in plays that required a large cast. One selection, Unfrozen, has a cast of 17 — a dozen women and five men. Human Services has a cast of 10 — six women and four men.
“Our desire for larger-cast shows is due to the fact that we have quite a few students and we want to provide this unique performance opportunity to as many students as possible,” King says. “The economics of professional theater keep pushing cast sizes smaller, except for musicals or sure-fire classics. As an educational theater, we’re able to provide large-cast new plays a home.”
Unfrozen is playwright Mark Eisman’s second Y.E.S. Festival win — his first, A Passion for Brandy, was produced in 2001. Eisman says he is honored to have been chosen for a second time and calls the festival process collaborative, congenial and “totally positive.” The connections made through A Passion for Brandy’s production have been important to the playwright as well.
“One of my panelists on Brandy invited me to join a wonderful new summer playwrights’ group in North Carolina, which proved to be a watershed experience, one that changed my life and my writing,” he says.
Other plays by Eisman, who lives in New York, include Dirty Harry and All the Extras, Gypsy in the Labyrinth and The Guy Upstairs, which was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for a Best New American Play award. In addition, he once wrote questions for the Jeopardy quiz show.
Eisman’s Unfrozen introduces us to Michelle, the black sheep in a family of figure skaters. NKU promises an oddball comedy about Michelle’s journey of self-discovery as she “finds her gift and finally has a chance to go for the gold.” King explored the idea of presenting an actual ice rink on stage, ultimately scrapping it as “a bit much” and a potential casting fiasco.
Instead, he says, “I’ve worked with a very talented student-choreographer, Margie Weimann, who has created a dance version of figure skating. The results are beautiful and I’m looking forward to the ways lighting and sound will help enhance the feeling of watching skating.”
The other selectee for 2017 is playwright Tom Baum’s Human Services, another comedy, though potentially darker. Directed by Michael Hatton, it focuses on Kelsey, a young celebrity who finds herself in a halfway house for addiction and at the mercy of her attention-hungry mother-slash-manager. According to NKU press materials, “Baum’s biting satire of celebrity culture surprises with every twist and turn, all while tackling the poignant issues of mental health, homelessness, gender identity and more.”
The L.A.-based Baum wrote the screenplay for the 1980 movie Carny, and also has written extensively for television. His produced plays include Wonk Love, The Great Outdoors and The Out of Body Treatment for Marital Dysfunction.
King, who has been with NKU for 31 years, has been involved with the Y.E.S. Festival in some form throughout his tenure — directing a play, directing the festival, serving on the panel, choosing the plays. He estimates he has read 800 plays.
“When I was interviewing for the position here, my visit was in the middle of a Y.E.S. Festival,” King says. “I saw one show in rehearsal and another one in performance. I was swept away by the creative energy and the enthusiasm of the casts and crews.”
That energy continues to feed King 31 years later. “The students keep me from becoming fossilized, and their energy is contagious,” he says.
Northern Kentucky University’s Y.E.S. FESTIVAL starts Thursday and runs through April 30. More info/tickets: theatre.nku.edu.
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2017.