Mee’s program to stage students’ writing

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t show up too often in theater.

It’s a sensitive topic, and playwrights without firsthand knowledge and full production resources tend to steer clear of it. But thanks to the vision of Chuck Mee, the director of the playwriting program at the Columbia University School of the Arts and his student Samara Weiss’s work, you can see the two collide—for free.

Mee, appointed chair of the School of the Arts playwriting department in 2007, has instigated several changes in the program that allow playwright graduate students the opportunity to put on full productions of their work. The most recent modification is the initiative that grants second-year students like Weiss the opportunity to stage full productions.

When Mee took over for Eduardo Machado as chair two years ago, he immediately made his mark on the department. He established an annual festival of full productions for third-year playwriting students called New Voices New Play Festival. Until last year, graduate students in the playwriting department were encouraged to perfect their writing from behind a desk rather than in rehearsal.

“You really need to work in the flesh and see how it works out. Eduardo had a different notion,” Mee said. “I’ve always thought that playwrights are not novelists. Playwrights don’t write for the page, they write for the stage.”

Although the new second-year productions won’t be staged in Riverside Church, like the New Voices festival was last year, graduate playwrights will still have the opportunity to attend rehearsals and make edits and rewrites throughout the process.

According to Mee, full productions grant the playwright a deeper understanding of the three-dimensional construct of his or her play that staged readings do not. “I think that readings can often be very misleading. You hear a reading and it’s not so exciting somehow, so you start rewriting. But that wasn’t the problem,” Mee said.

Mee is particularly excited about the diversity within the productions of this season. He has tried to incorporate an international aspect into the curriculum, bringing in visiting international playwrights and admitting more international students into the program.

“About half the students are from other countries and they bring with them an understanding of the kind of theater they grew up in, Mee said. “You step into a room full of lots of different ideas about a great way to make a play.”

The result is a broad range of different types of plays from Weiss’s “AK-47 Sing-Along” about the manipulating influence of children’s television shows on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to Erin Moughon’s dark comedy “Pretend That You Owe Me” about a nine-year-old girl who acquires unlimited power.

Weiss’s play is strongly political and deals with the disturbing subject of the manipulation of Palestinian children’s minds toward violence, but it has a message that Weiss found important and underrepresented in the theatrical world­—the kind of politically charged, controversial message that resonates with the Columbia community.

“In mainstream theater, it’s difficult for people to address these things, you know, there’s a lot of risk associated with putting up productions which address the topic [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], no matter which side they’re coming from,” Weiss said. “But because we’re student theater, we can do whatever we like.”

And there’s something exciting about being an audience member, witnessing such a labor of love for the first time.

According to Mee, “Columbia people coming to see their [the playwrights’] work will not feel they’ve seen one more play just like the last 376 plays they saw … but something that comes from somebody’s heart and is shaped by their lives.”