So being in New York is amazing, but it means missing the Playground Festival at Carnegie Mellon, and that makes me profoundly sad.
The Playground Festival has been an institution at Carnegie Mellon for seven years now. The main principle is that sometimes when you’re really busy learning how to make theatre, you don’t have a lot of time to just make theatre. Playground changed that, lending resources out to student productions, installations, readings, performance art, and (in recent years) the errant film.
By no means is the Festival perfect. There are three main production spaces and ticketing is always an issue in terms of both space within the theaters and the long lines that crop up at the beginning of every new ticketing session. As the Festival grows in popularity, more proposals get sent in which sort of inevitably means more proposals get rejected. Usually we all heal by the time Playground Week actually starts. (Or we become distracted by our own huge projects. Thank you Cass and Olivia for bringing me on to Dr. Horrible!)
Even with some of the hurt feelings, Playground is a wonderful opportunity for both students from other departments and other schools and citizens of greater Pittsburgh to figure out exactly what goes on in the School of Drama once you leave the infamous “watering hole” of a lobby. Continue reading
Lillian Lemoning 