Works by three student playwrights from the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University have been chosen for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) Region IV Festival, which will be held online February 1 – 6.
Mothers and Terrorists by David Beach, which received the 2021 KCACTF Region IV John L. Cauble One-Act Play honor, will be staged this year with a full virtual production on Thursday, February 3, from 7 – 9 p.m. EST. Sarah Cosgrove’s I Lived to Tell, a Cauble recipient for 2022, will be performed on Friday, February 4, from 6 – 7 p.m. EST. Cherished by Rachel Graf Evans, winner of the KCACTF Region IV’s 2022 David Shelton Award (the region’s highest award for full-length, student-written plays) will be presented on Saturday, February 5, from 7 – 10 p.m. EST.
Playwright’s Lab Director Todd Ristau said the selection of the three plays for this year’s festival “continues Hollins’ unbroken string of successes with KCACTF Region IV. Over the years, our student playwrights have garnered awards in nearly every category of playwriting at KCACTF, up to and including the National Student Playwriting Award and the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion. Last year, all three regional John L. Cauble One-Act Plays were by Hollins playwrights, and though they normally only nominate two of those three to Nationals, they took the unprecedented step of nominating all three.”
In addition to a reading with a professional response session for the playwright at the regional festival, Ristau added that the Shelton Award comes with the expectation of a full production of the winning play the following year. “These plays are also automatically nominated to Nationals in the full-length play category. Hollins has had numerous Shelton-winning plays over the years, with most of them featured in our Hollins-Mill Mountain Winter Festival of New Works. These plays frequently receive higher national awards for both the text as well as the production value in design, directing, and performance.”
KCACTF is a national theater program involving 18,000 students annually from colleges and universities across the country. Since its inception, KCACTF has given more than 400,000 college theater students the opportunity to have their work critiqued, improve their dramatic skills, and receive national recognition for excellence. More than 16 million theatergoers have attended approximately 10,000 festival productions nationwide. KCACTF Region IV represents colleges and universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Virginia.
