LEXINGTON, Ky.—More than a dozen student playwrights at Transylvania University will soon see an anthology of their work released by a major U.S. publisher and available for productions in English-speaking theaters around the world.
Dramatic Publishing has announced plans to release “My #*%!^X%#! College Life,” co-created by Transylvania professor Michael Dixon and 2016 graduate Brooke Jennett, who recently won the 2016 Dramatists Guild of America Young Playwright Award.
The play, which features 40 monologues along with a few choruses, is a humorous and heartbreaking look into the hearts and minds of today’s college students. It touches on a wide range of issues—including social justice, gender identity, relationship boundaries, future prospects and roommate etiquette.
“Throughout this creative process, Brooke and I have wanted the play to address a broad range of concerns identified by college students today,” Dixon said. “This dramatic journey reveals the difficult choices and revelatory encounters that lead to what colleges call ‘personal transformation,’ which is generally beneficial but, as this material attests, it’s never easy to change at any age and the individual outcomes are absolutely unpredictable.”
The dramatic monologues were written by 17 Transylvania students and a dozen other playwrights, mostly in MFA playwriting programs around the country, including Ohio University, University of Arizona and University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The project has been in the works for two years and was originally conceived by Jon Jory, former producing artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville. The individual monologues were selected from more than 200 submissions and sequenced for a dramatically effective, hour-long performance. While Dixon expects the anthology will be published sometime later this year, no exact date has been set.
The university’s Theater Program will present a reading of the script the weekend of March 30 to April 2.
The Transylvania playwrights in the publication are: Joseph Michael Bahena, Brayden Bergman, Katie Brewer-Calvert, Mattie Bruton, Sophia Burke, Kathryn R. Gillespie, Kaitlin Haggard, Michael A. Huelsman, Hannah Jacky, Brooke Jennett, Trevor Kassis, Mollie LaFavers, Olivia Luken, Isabel Peña, Stephanie Robinson, Theodora Zora Salazar, Natasha Renee Smith, Charlotte Stephens, Jessica Wilson and Justin D. Wright.
Other playwrights include Janet Allard, Erica Beimesche, Kamilah Bush, Justin Yu-Young Chien, Adam Denoyer, Briana Garcia, Maya Hamer, Philana Omorotionmwan, Emy Stevens and Elizabeth Wong.