River Campus festivals wrap; playwright winner, spring production announced

A full-week of festivities on Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus came to a close this past weekend during the eighth annual Summer Arts Festival.

The festival offered visual and performing arts exhibitions and activities.

The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, a new addition to the festival this year, closed out it's week with performances, a panel discussion and an awards ceremony.

The playwright festival consisted of two divisions: short plays and full-length plays, said Kitt Lavoie, assistant professor of theater, acting and directing at Southeast. Five finalists were selected in both categories.

Lavoie said the top five full-length plays were selected out of more than 750 submissions from around the United States.

An aerial dancer performs during the River Campus Summer Arts Festival on Saturday in Cape Girardeau.Sarah Yenesel

"The Romantic Movement" by Emily Bohannon, a playwright, screenwriter and actress originally from Sandersville, Georgia, was selected as the winner of the festival.

Her play will receive a full production next spring as part of the 2021-2022 Dobbins Conservatory season and be considered for publication with Concord Theatricals.

"The Romantic Movement" is set in the summer of 1967 in rural Florida. High school students gather to study classical music during the heart of the Vietnam War and the Summer of Love, according to the event program.

"[My play] is really a play about yourself — figuring out who you are through art, and becoming sort of alive to music and the joy of that, and the joy of finding a community and people who understand you through music," Bohannon said. "The larger question, though, is, sort of, young people figuring out who they are."

Bohannon said the play offered her an opportunity to write about some of her own personal experiences, such as growing up playing an instrument and participating in band programs throughout school, and create characters she would have liked to play in her undergrad years.

"When I was majoring in theater in undergrad, there were very few roles to work on that were close to my experience, so I worked on characters who were a lot older than me," Bohannon said. "I felt like I never really was able to find exactly who I was at that time, so I feel like, through this process, it's given me a chance to almost reach a hand back to my younger self by creating material for all these young women to work on -- that's really felt personally healing and fulfilling to me."

Bohannon is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School, received a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from the University of Georgia and was a Rockwell Scholar at the Einhorn School of Performing Arts.

The other four finalists in the full-length division were "Randi & Roxanne" by Rachel Graf Evans, "Jungle Juice" by Kevin Renn, "All Eight" by Lilly Camp and "Civics and Humanities for Non-Majors" by Jeff Talbott.

All plays in the short-play division of the festival were written by playwrights who reside in Missouri or are students at universities in the state.

The five short-plays selected as finalists were "Lawncare" by Paul Vintner, "The Bee that Declared a War" by Cary J. Simowitz, "Don't Toy with Me" by Andrew Black, "Remembering Morgan" by Annie Brown and "Rising" by Gabrielle Freitas.

Lavoie said a fully-produced evening of these plays will also be presented as part of the 2021-2022 Dobbins Conservatory of Theatre and Dance season.

According to the event program, the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival aims to "identify and support new plays featuring robust roles for college-aged actors, while providing a laboratory to train students in the skills and ethics inherent to working with playwrights on new scripts."

"One of the goals of this [playwright] festival is, really, to be a resource to universities around the country to find plays that they should be doing that have college-aged kinds of characters, or characters that students can play," Lavoie said.

The River Campus also held an Acting Intensive Camp and Dance Intensive Camp last week leading up to the Summer Arts Festival, where participants performed throughout the day.

Other activities during the Summer Arts Festival included live music, art demonstrations, visual arts displays, family-friendly art experiential activities, museum exhibitions and other hands-on activities throughout the River Campus.

For more information, or to view upcoming events on the River Campus, visit www.rivercampus.org.