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Other Features: Distinct by Design Who Would Have Predicted This? Theater on a Shoestring Sunny-side Up This is Your Life Toss Out the Catalog Photo Gallery Playwright Dan Shea, MFA'00, (left) and "Killing Ed Cid" Director Vincent Cardinal work through a challenge on the set. Members of the cast and crew listen as Nick Francone, MFA '02, describes his plan for the production's set in Kantner Hall's Virginia Hahne Theater. Cast members (from left) Stephen Eshenbaugh, Ric Sechrest and Andrea Smith on stage.

Look what you can do with a fine script, four actors and a few hundred bucks Story by Mary Alice Casey Photography by Megan Stark Five hundred dollars. Enough to feed a family of four for a month? Maybe. Or cover two payments on a 1999 Ford Taurus station wagon? Probably. But comprise the entire budget of a two-hour play? Of course. When the cause is contributing new work to American theater, giving emerging playwrights a voice and exposing young actors to the demands of a live audience, expenses can be paid in sweat and cents. That certainly was true when "Killing El Cid," a two-act comedy by Dan Shea, MFA '00, evolved from a 1998 class assignment to the final production of the School of Theater's 2000-01 mainstage season. Staged in the intimate, 60-seat Virginia Hahne Studio Theater, the play was produced on a shoestring that covered scenery, costumes, lighting, props and publicity. Luckily, there was a payoff at each of the 10 final bows. Audience members exploded with applause for Shea's thought-provoking script and the cast of four that gave it life. "El Cid" explored some sensitive topics - self-doubt, aging, homophobia, stereotyping - as it relayed the quandary of a single, 60s-something woman looking to retire gracefully both from her job and her fantasy lover of more than 40 years. Vincent Cardinal, who directed the play, has headed the School of Theater for three years and its dramatic writing program for six. He says such productions are successful because cast and crew pay "the human time debt." "The frugality of our students in making the pennies look like a million dollars is amazing," Cardinal says. "This production was typical of the generosity of time and talent the actors and crew members give in making new plays happen." "El Cid," he says, is a wonderful example of a play that emerged from a carefully honed School of Theater process and now is prime material for professional venues. Shea penned the script in February 1998 during his second year of graduate school and had it read at that spring's Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights Festival. The annual campus event gives graduate students a chance to receive feedback from professional playwrights and local audiences. In 1999, the play made it to the stage in a workshop production directed by William Fisher, who heads the school's undergraduate acting program. The next destination - which it reached while Shea was serving a one-year visiting professorship with the school - was the Hahne Theater this past spring. Rewrites occurred each step of the way, says the playwright, who continued tweaking the script in response to audience reaction going into the second weekend of the two-week mainstage run. "It really became five to 10 times the play it was when we went in," says Shea, who doubled as "El Cid," a flamboyant-Spanish-hero-turned-dumpy-couch-potato. "This experience far, far exceeded my expectations - the whole process." Once the play closed, Shea communed with Cardinal and then started in on still more rewrites ("while I have all this positive karma"). His plan: to copy and send the script - a handful at a time - to theaters around the country, everywhere from the big-name houses of New York and Chicago to venues that specialize in developing new works or give greater consideration to scripts about women. With luck, the play will land him a contract, as the 1999-2000 mainstage season's "Tamicanfly" did for Scott Marshall Taylor, MFA '97. That play opened Off-Broadway in January. It's ironic, Cardinal says, that programs such as Ohio University's have assumed a role in fostering young playwrights that 50 years ago was the niche of Off-Broadway venues. And that's an issue of economics: "It's not unusual for an Off-Broadway show to run half a million dollars. Off-Broadway has become what Broadway used to be," Cardinal says. "So the question becomes, 'Where do freshman playwrights go to get their work produced?'" That's a question Shea asked himself in 1997 while wrapping up work on a master's in theater at Kansas State University. He'd acted Off-Loop (Chicago's version of Off-Broadway), done standup comedy and toured with children's theater. But what he wanted most was to use his playwright's voice. One of his KSU professors referred him to Cardinal and Ohio University. "There's something really special happening here," says Shea, who unabashedly ranks the University's theater program as one of the top two or three in the country and Cardinal and Professor of Theater Charles Smith among a handful of the best playwriting teachers anywhere. "They're really nurturing new playwrights, and they take it seriously. Not all universities do that." Mary Alice Casey is editor of Ohio Today. Megan Stark, BSVC '01, is pursuing a photography career in Los Angeles.