Renowned Playwright Creates New Work Through Student Collaboration

A group of Westmont students is getting a unique opportunity to work with an internationally acclaimed playwright, crafting a new production students will eventually perform in February. The Westmont Theater Arts department has commissioned playwright Erik Ehn to develop a new play as part of his ongoing Saint Play series.

Eighteen students will meet with Ehn Friday night, Dec. 2, and all day Saturday, Dec. 3, at Porter Theatre to continue the collaboration on the creation and development of the play. It will be completed Dec. 15, and Westmont students will perform the premiere Friday, Feb. 24., at Westmont’s Porter Theatre. The production will run through March 4.

Ehn is a playwright, educator and theorist of contemporary theater. He is the dean of the school of theater at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, and has received the Alpert Award in the Arts, a Whiting Writers Award and other honors. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in playwriting from Yale University and has written more than three dozen plays.

“The most unique thing is to be able to work directly with Erik Ehn,” says Mitchell Thomas, Westmont assistant theater arts professor, who will direct the play. “The students will be able to see how the threads of things that we talked about in workshops eventually come out in this play. To have an international playwright working alongside the students here is a really wonderful opportunity for everybody, myself included.”

The Saint Plays are an ongoing cycle of plays loosely based on the lives of the saints and biblical characters.
“A saint is a human mandala—a life in a ritual shape held up as a focus for contemplation,” Ehn writes in the prologue to The Saint Plays.

“So many times I feel distant when I'm reading about a saint or a biblical character,” says Thomas. “It feels like a literary construct. They feel distant and incredibly holy and sacred. Even though I can learn from them, I don't connect with them. I believe that Erik and I are trying to see both the divinity and the humanity of these characters. Sometimes in deconstructing people, we can make them more alive.”

An online blog has been created to follow the creative process at: http://blogs.westmont.edu/the_saint_plays/.
Ehn will speak at convocation, Friday, Dec. 2, at 10:30 a.m., in Westmont’s Murchison Gym.