Crimson and Gold Connection; Dr. Cynthia Allen

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. Welcome to this week's episode of the Crimson and Gold Connection on 89KRPS. I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro, coming to the Miller Theater inside of the Bicknell Family Center for the Arts. For a four-day run starting on Thursday, April 26th through Sunday, April 29th is the play, gruesome playground injuries by Rajeev Joseph. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for another play, Bangal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in 2010. Joining me this week is the director of Pittsburgh State University's production of gruesome playground injuries, Dr. Cynthia Allen. I want to thank you for joining me for the Crimson and Gold Connection. Thank you for having me. And gruesome playground injuries. It's a relatively new play, only first produced in 2011. So what is the story about this play? Maybe I've never heard of it. I don't think many people have heard of it.

But Rajeev Joseph is a really exciting new voice in American theater. Many of his things become finalists or win awards, and he's won a lot already in his young career. He has an excellent ear for dialogue, and in this particular play we follow two people who meet when they are eight years old in Catholic school. And it follows them through 30 years of their relationship, as they bump into each other between college and life events and losing parents and those sorts of things. But it's taught in a very, or it's told rather in a very fragmented way. So that we meet them at eight, and we jump forward 15 years. And then the third scene, we come back 10 years, and then forward 15 and back 10. And that's the way we watch their story all the way until they're 38 years old. So it's a non-linear play, and I talked with you before the hand. That seems kind of how to be drawn into a play, because you don't, because if you have

a linear story of somebody's life, like another movie I'm thinking of, the curious case of Benjamin Bunn, you know, that is a unique story because it's told in reverse. And this is the drive you're going to be because it's told in segments and jumps around. Right. And I think that that is, as we've mentioned before, that's more common in a film narrative. But to see it happen on the stage is also a lot of fun, too, because it gives the actors a lot of room to play with jumping around with ages like that. And to find in the script those points where, oh, yes, that's right. And I remember saying this to him when I was 13, oh, she's picking up on, you know, some things that are a memory or that, you know, form their personality at an earlier age and you find threads of that in their later ages. But it's fun for the audience, too, because you're watching the slide back and forth. And with every new scene, a little bit more of the piece of the puzzle comes together.

And the scenes are short, and many of them are extremely funny, obviously, since eight year olds meet. He is incredibly accident prone. And there are a tremendous number of things that each of them suffer, actually, throughout the course of their relationship. And it's the same performers that are playing the 38 year old version and the eight year old version. Yes, it's two actors who it's quite a, it's quite a feat for them and a tremendous amount of work to pull off the same two characters as they move through their entire life into their middle age. And that must be quite a feat for the two performers. Are they juniors or seniors or one is a senior and one is a junior. And when they work out in the field, this is the kind of thing they're going to have to do where in small productions like this, all the eyes and the attention is going to be focused on them.

This is a good practice performance for a play for something like this. Yes. This kind of intensity and the kind of work they have to do to dig deep into a character is something that's more than norm in American theater, the economics of which mean that until there are a lot of two person, three person, four person plays produced in the professional theater. So this is getting them ready for that. I'm speaking with Dr. Cynthia Allen. She's the director of Pittsburgh State University's production of a gruesome playground injuries, which is starting a four day run April 26th at the Bicknell Family Center for the Arts. As a professor, also, and somebody who's been involved in theater for a long time, how do you work with an actor or actress to help them get ready for a role like this? You help them find where the details are. Every single sentence we have to work on what word is emphasized here? What is she thinking about her? What is he referring back to? Since so much of the player relies on memories, things they've known about each other from

the time they were young, there's a way we say things with a tone of voice and an emphasis to someone we've known a long time versus someone that we just met or we're just talking to in a casual way. And so finding all those sort of emotional linchpin moments and why would you say something in such a manner or why would you phrase that in such a manner to him has been a lot of the work of this play. You know, there are a lot of plays you could have selected. You chose this one, a relatively new play. I was wondering what was the thought behind choosing this one? We try to have a balanced season and to cut across all different genres, we do tend to focus more on modern and contemporary plays in our program. We like our students to be reasonably well read and ready for contemporary American theater when they go out.

And so this play fits this spring slot really perfectly. It is a fairly short play, runs about 90 minutes, it has an interesting pace to it, it's a little bit quirky, it's new, it's fresh, and in the spring time is not the time to try to do Shakespeare and or some of the heavier plays from the 1800s or whatever. We try to find a play that brings something fresh and new that people want to come to as opposed to maybe playing frisbee out on the field. Everything has a season. Everything has a season and gruesome playground injuries is kind of that perfect spring time play. This is a love story. It is a love story. But it's a love story in the way that many of our love stories in our lives are that you don't really know if it's the connection going to be made, is it not going to be made? You know, somebody just going off to college, you think about all the friendships that kind

of fall apart when someone goes to college and someone else doesn't. And then how do people reconnect? And the older you get, the harder it is to find those connection points. Dr. Cynthia Allen is chair of the Communications Department at Pittsburgh State University. She's also the director of Pitt State's production of gruesome playground injuries, taking place Thursday, April 26th through Sunday, April 29th. For more information, visit pitstay.org and search playground injuries. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.