The Westmont theater program presents The Future Is Short, a showcase of six short plays in six locations on the Westmont campus. This festival-style show features short plays written over the last decade and a half within Westmont’s Hive Program, which partners Westmont undergraduate directors with MFA playwrights from a variety of associated schools, including Brown, UCSD, Columbia University, and UT Austin. In the 13 years of the Hive Program, students have generated more than 100 short plays that have been featured in the annual Westmont Fringe.
Recently, Mitchell Thomas (Westmont theater arts professor and one of this showcase’s directors) chose a selection of 20 plays for an anthology, also called The Future Is Short, published by Bloomsbury in September. “It felt right to launch the book by producing some of these plays,” he says. “It’s a pedestrian theater event in site-specific spaces. Audiences will travel from show to show and will have different paths to see six plays in six different locations.”
Thomas says each play is designed as a unique world to create unique encounters for the audience. “Each experience feels playful in its own way,” he says. “There’s a theatrical boldness, a lot of energy.”
Other showcase directors and designers include current students and alumni, leading Thomas to describe the production as an experimental celebration of Westmont drama: past, present, and future. The plays are thematically and stylistically eclectic, including stories about a pair of worms on fishing hooks processing their imminent demise, the existential dread of becoming an adult, and the importance of biodiversity. Characters include possums, puppets, and a fourth-wall breaking Virginia Woolf exploring contemporary feminism.
The Future Is Short promises to be a distinctive mini-festival, running at Westmont (955 La Paz Rd.) October 16 at 7:30 p.m., October 17 at 2 and 7:30 p.m., and October 18 at 7:30 p.m. See westmont.edu/academics/majors-and-degrees/theatre-arts/box-office.
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