The Lamron

Issue date: 4/5/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Ben Gajewski Sophomore Sarah Rychlick in Truth Therapy.

The Lamron sat down with directors Jason Gonser and writers James Merenda, and Danny Carroll, three of the creative minds behind this semester's VegSOUP production, which will be comprised of three one-act plays.

The Lamron: What made you pick these two plays to be performed?

Jason Gonser: It's the same process as how Renee [Hartz] chose her show. Students submitted plays to potential directors. Renee haggled me into this project because she was originally going to do four shows with another director. Then, that other person backed out so she roped me into doing it. Out of the four plays, she had chosen two of them and in the end, through reading them and working things out, Renee chose [to direct] Truth Therapy. I chose to work on Rain and Cecity.

The Lamron: In terms of writing the plays, did you ever expect them to be placed together in the same show?

Danny Carroll: Not really. No. We talk and collaborate sometimes over ideas, but in the process of writing both shows, we did it completely independently. And I believe...did you write your's for...

James Merenda: Yeah. I already had maybe a fragment or two and then, when they announced that VegSOUP would be doing a student-written work, I had to try to shuffle all my ideas together within a weekend to get a decent working draft to Renee.

DC: But I had Rain written prior to them announcing that they were going to do a student playwright series.

The Lamron: What did you think of the process of getting a play from script to production?

DC: The beautiful thing about this for me is the fact that I had it written. All the work that I have done on this show was done last semester. I have made it a point to give him [Gonser] all control, not even let me on to his consent. So my name's on the play, the words are mine, but that's about it.

JM: I peeked a little bit. I came to second tech and looked at the show, but it was purely as "I wanna see what's going on." It wasn't like "I'm gonna judge you now." I think we actually had to sign a thing that said basically don't interfere in a nice way. It was basically them saying, "We don't want the director and the playwright to be fighting over this because it just hinders the process." And I guess that's good because it reflects, for the most part, what people as playwrights or directors will have to face in the professional world.

Continued...

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