Homegrown theatre will be Breaking Ground later this month
by Abby Zayas - Contributing Writer
Theatre is, by nature, a highly collaborative environment. Students at Monmouth work together as actors, stage managers, assistant directors, designers, researchers, builders, and much more. This semester, though, the students take even more of a lead with the upcoming production titled Breaking Ground: features four student written plays, and students take on the role of directors as well.
The 2025-26 theatre season has already featured student leadership. Back in August, Edrass Chávez-Alvarado started his work as director on a production of José Rivera’s Marisol. The theatre and music senior had the opportunity to helm the entire process, and he returns for Breaking Ground not as a director, but as a playwright. Chávez-Alvarado penned Katia, a play in which the main character is a death row inmate visited by a being that is “not quite divine, but not quite mortal.” Between the conversation shared by these two and the scenes between Katia and the prison guards before, they unravel what Chávez-Alvarado described as “a play that…ask us to confront prejudice or…our own preconceived notions of what things are.” After being involved in every aspect of Marisol’s production, Katia has proven to be a different experience. “I kind of feel like…I’ve sent my child off to daycare,” he said. “Where it is still my creation…but now I’m forced to kind of take a step back and find out how clearly am I able to achieve just in the writing what it is that I want to convey…”
Chávez-Alvarado is not the only theatre major with a play featured in Breaking Ground. Ray Shaul is the playwright behind Ash on the Heart, a play following a confrontation between two former lovers who went through a devastating break-up and find it as difficult to move on as it is to see one another again. She described how the play started as a break from another project: a one-act she later self-published. What was initially intended as a new story ended up becoming the one act’s ending, but Shaul described how Ash on the Heart still took on a life of its own. She also said of passing off her play for someone else to direct has been about “finding that balance” between being involved but also stepping back for the director to take over.
Shaul is also experiencing both sides, she is directing the play titled With You, Always, written by Adyson Beebe. Beebe is the only underclassman playwright featured among the group: her work follows a young couple torn apart when one tragically dies, but have the opportunity for one last conversation at the funeral. With a small cast, the play ponders the nature of grief, providing the audience with a story equal parts tragic and hopeful. Beebe has already been involved in the theatre department with work in Our Town last semester and participation at ACTF, the college theatre festival.
Of course, Breaking Ground isn’t just the creation of theatre majors. Jennifer Ruscitti, senior Classics and English double major is co-playwright (along with yours truly) of Something Fishy This Way Comes, following two scientists on the Illinois River struggling to figure out what is mutating the fish they catch. The play was developed last school year in Professor David Wright’s advanced creative writing course focused on narrative. Ruscitti is a veteran of creative writing here on campus, having taken part not only in narrative study but in a poetry-centric course the year prior.
She described playwriting as having some “barriers to cross,” because as a writer she likes to “discuss emotions or place them at the center” of her work, and playwriting demands so much of the emotions be left to the director, actors, and team to uncover when putting it on. Nevertheless, Ruscitti said she “loved the time to connect with one another” in class in read-throughs and “was thrilled” at the prospect of the show being featured in Breaking Ground. In addition to this, Ruscitti spoke on the environmental nature of the play, and how a recent class “instilled in [her] an appreciation for the natural world,” and that sharing a play regarding such issues with the broader campus “felt like an honor.”
Tickets for Breaking Ground are on sale now. The play will take place in the Hewes Studio Theatre on February 20th-22nd (7:30 Friday and Saturday, 2:00 Sunday).