Words in motion

UTRGV students in the ENGL 4351, Advanced Creative Writing: Workshop in Playwriting course are turning original scripts into staged performances as part of the annual Ten-Minute Play festival.

The event will take place from 7 to 10 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday at the Albert L. Jeffers Theatre on the Edinburg campus. Admission is free and open to the public.

“Plays aren’t meant to be read; they’re meant to be seen and heard,” said Robert Moreira, a senior lecturer in the Creative Writing department. “We start with a monologue and we graduate to a dialogue, then that becomes a scene.”

Moreira spoke about the selections of plays that will be presented.

“It is a range of plays,” he said. “We have some satires as well as plays of touchy topics with ideas that deal with things like suicide.”

One featured piece is “The Turtle,” written by Pedro Torres, an English junior.

“The play is about a turtle president named Mr. Sunshine who wants to go to war with the rabbits,” Torres said, who has a background in theater.

He said the idea was inspired by “Saturday Night Live’s” political sketches and the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare.”

“There’s a lot of symbolism there,” Torres said. “It used to be a straight drama but, with everything going on in the world right now, I thought we needed to laugh.”

Tanner Mott, a theatre freshman, who plays the lead role of Mr. Sunshine, said portraying his particular character has had unique challenges.

“You want to get the tone right,” Mott said. “It has to be funny, but you don’t want to offend anyone. There’s a monologue at the start that sounds just like a typical [President Donald] Trump speech and I think audiences will really enjoy that moment.”

He also emphasized the collaborative element of the project. 

“The script changed a lot through rehearsals,” Mott said. “We’d try something, then go back and change it again.”

The collaboration has been essential for the entire production, according to Bryana Guerra, a theatre freshman.

“I saw the first draft, and it’s completely different now,” Guerra said. “The final version is so much stronger because everyone added their voice to it. That’s what I love about plays. You never know what it’ll become once it hits the stage.”

She mentioned her opinion on the significance of this particular play.

“There are many things in life right now that are super serious and there is not as much laughter in the world as there should be,” Guerra said. “I think this play brings a little taste of what’s happening in the world with a little bit of laughter.”