Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004 | 8:36 a.m.
In the green room of UNLV's Black Box Theatre, which has all the austere charm of a green room mismatched furniture and empty walls playwright Cody Tucker takes a break alongside director Jerry Crawford.
The moment could almost be Kodak. Tucker is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Theatre's playwright program and is having his first play, "Harlequin Brill," produced. Crawford is a UNLV professor emeritus who founded the program in 1990.
The play, which opens Friday, is an ambitious undertaking with its 20-member cast and tight budget.
It's also the season opener for UNLV's Nevada Conservatory Theatre and is Tucker's thesis play a nail-biting experience for the young playwright, who has been milling around the dark theater during rehearsals.
"The first thing you learn is how nerve-racking it is to hear your words," said Tucker, dressed in a white St. Louis Rams T-shirt, gray stocking cap and olive-green pants.
But there are plenty of benefits to this experience, he said, including the chance to work with a dedicated cast and receive financial backing from the college.
"A 20-person show, there's no way I could do that in the professional world," Tucker said. "I'm taking advantage of all the things they're offering."
This is why Tucker, who majored in history and minored in English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., chose UNLV for his master's of fine arts degree, though he had already been accepted by Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.
Tucker is not alone. UNLV's Master of Fine Arts playwriting program has gained a reputation for its writing and production opportunities, which appeal to students eager to learn from experience.
"It's a good, vigorous course to provide ways for beginning writers to develop their talent, and it's the opportunity to have your work onstage," said Jeff Koep, dean of the UNLV College of Fine Arts. "That doesn't happen in all programs.
"NYU has an excellent playwright program, but you as a graduate playwright have to put (your play) on somewhere else."
Play time
The MFA theater program is growing in a direction department representatives have hoped it would. In the past 10 years, 62 students have graduated in performance, design/technology and playwriting.
Twenty-six of those graduates were playwrights, including Jenny Laird, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, who received a Joseph Jefferson nomination for Outstanding New Work for "Ballad Hunter," and Cheryldee Huddleston, whose play, "Who Loves You, Jimmie Orrio," won the PEN USA Literary Award for Drama.
Shawn Overton, a 2003 MFA graduate of UNLV's playwriting program, stayed in Las Vegas to serve as resident playwright for the Cockroach Theatre, a nonprofit group founded by graduate and undergraduate students who took a play to Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year.
Additionally, students have the opportunity to work with guest artists, such as the equity actors brought in for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" And Wole Soyinka, a Nobel laureate in literature, took student actors from UNLV to Greece in 2002 to perform "Oedipus at Colonus" for the XI International Meeting for Ancient Greek Drama in Delphi. Nevada Conservatory Theatre produced the play and received grants from the European Cultural Center of Delphi to make the trip possible.
"What greater learning experience can you have than that?" said Bob Brewer, artistic director for Nevada Conservatory Theatre, which was established three years ago to bring in equity actors and establish professional theater at UNLV.
Brewer, who hopes to see student-written productions presented in the university's main theater, where NCT's main productions are performed (currently, student productions fall under NCT's Adventure Series), has big plans, which include turning the guest equity program into a League of Regional Theaters program.
In the next few years, Brewer said, "We will be able to offer equity cards to the students before they leave. We're one of the largest cities in the country that doesn't have the LORT theatre. Chicago has Goodman, Indianapolis has Indiana Repertory Theatre."
With Las Vegas' growth and NCT subscriptions and donations increasing, Brewer sees a possibility.
"This is fertile territory," he said.
Pleasantly pulp
For Tucker, seeing his play produced has been a "flattering" experience.
"Harlequin Brill" is a tragicomedy subtitled "A Peculiarly Pulp Play on Tape" that incorporates elements of pulp, romance and mystery.
A Beach Boys fan, Tucker's inspiration came from Brian Wilson's soon-to-be-released "Smile," or, as Tucker refers to it by its past moniker, "The greatest album that never was."
"The record company printed out 500,000 covers before a note was even heard," Tucker said.
In "Harlequin Brill," the lead character, Geoffrey Habland, works as a writer in the basement of the Brill Building, where the bargain-bin books are cheap to write, cheap to market and low maintenance. When noticed by the publisher, who wants him to write a good novel, Geoffrey, aka Thomas Mantle, explores a new side of himself.
"He has devious plans to market Mantle. That's kind of where it takes off," Tucker said. "He's asked to write this book and he gets more involved with the spoils.
"He's introduced to the spoils of successful writing before he is even spoiled."
The play and its production has received a ringing endorsement from Crawford, who last week said, "I'm always saying to him, 'You're a writer, not yet a playwright.' "
"Next week," Crawford said, "he's a playwright."
Writing the script
Crawford came to UNLV in 1962, when the campus had four buildings, no grass, no trees, no performing arts center, granted no degrees and was known officially as the southern regional division of the University of Nevada.
A playwright and 32-year professor at UNLV, Crawford initiated the program and modeled it after the programs at Yale and the University of Iowa, where he received his last degree and was mentored by theater critic and former Yale professor Howard Stein, who taught for seven years at Iowa.
"The concern was, my friend Howard Stein said, 'You're very isolated. In a cosmopolitan area you have access to things,' " Crawford said. "Here we're in the middle of the desert. The advantage to that is that you would have full-time residents."
A former director of literary seminars at the Utah Shake- spearean Festival, Crawford received an Excellence in Theater Education Award from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. He is not afraid to tout UNLV's program.
"I would say of the top programs in the country we're in an echelon aspiring to become the very top," Crawford said. "If you look at it as baseball we'd be a AAA team preparing for the major leagues."
Heading the program is KC (Kerry) Davis, who worked with new plays at the Sundance Institute and with Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" at the Eureka Theatre.
Davis is the successor to award-winning playwright Julie Jensen, who played a large role in developing the program. UNLV is seeking a replacement for the popular professor/director Davey Marlin Jones, who died this spring. Crawford, who retired from the university in the 1990s, is filling in until then.
More than a dozen plays are written by students in the playwriting program, and students must have at least one produced. This includes one-act plays, 10-minute plays and a full-length play.
Produced plays, such as "Harlequin Brill," incorporate graduate and nongraduate actors, lighting technicians and set designers.
Levi Fackrell, who graduated with a bachelor's in acting from UNLV in 2002 and collaborated with other UNLV graduates to form Cockroach Theatre, appreciated the collaborative effort among graduate and nongraduate students.
"When you're an undergrad, it's tough to get stage time," Fackrell, vice president of Cockroach Theatre, said. "With MFA plays, you get decent-sized roles. It was a collaborative effort. The majority of the plays we did were written by MFA playwrights.
"They really instilled this sense of collaboration that didn't really come from the actual acting program, but the playwriting program."
Also, Fackrell said, "It was great because it gave us a chance to be in a production that had never been done before."
archive
