Outlaw Playwrights was assembled by undergraduate theater
majors (and some graduate students) at the University Park
campus of PennState, and ran from the early 90s
through the early Aughts. It was generally held once a week during semesters,
at 11:15 pm on Thursday nights, in a black box theater in the basement of the
main theater building near North Halls and the PalmerMuseum of Art in State
College. Between 1997 and 1999, I had four one-acts produced by
the Outlaws— The Touched: A Very Black Comedy, Hearing Angels, Dada
Circus, and Mortuary Puppies. If I deem Hearing Angels too naïve to be
included, the other three still hold some interest for me— as experiments done
by a young writer with some theater experience (I had done the Carnegie Mellon
pre-college program for drama as a teenager), feeling around for a way to make
a one-act play interesting (a one-act being theater’s equivalent of a sonnet),
employing avant-garde extremity and poetic language (especially in Mortuary Puppies) to do so.
The Outlaws theater crowd was an interesting one— and by the
time I left State College in late ’98
(Mortuary Puppies was produced in ’99 without me being there), I had spent some
time hanging out and partying with them. They were, admittedly, very insular,
and when I began attending Outlaws with my friends in ‘94/’95, we would poke
fun at their dramatic gestures and semi-affected interactions (as a non
theater-major, it took me a few years to infiltrate Outlaws enough to become a
viable playwright for them). What I later realized is that the PSU theater crew
felt vulnerable, as actors/actresses often do, among crowds different from
themselves, and Outlaw Playwrights had a solid following (also) among non
theater majors on campus. The feeling each Thursday night— that you could see
anyone at Outlaws, making it an el primo occasion to see and be seen— made it
heart-stopping for everyone, especially because the convention was to hang out
in the L-shaped, garishly lit hallway which wrapped around the black-box theater
for 15-20 minutes before the door opened. Going down the long staircase towards
the L-shaped hallway and the black box, I always got butterflies.
In fact, from
about dinner-time onwards I always had butterflies on Thursday nights. Outlaw
Playwrights, in fact, was one operative feature of PSU which made it so that
for the years I was there, I never felt pinched by the football-n-frats
imbroglio of State College life. Paterno, for
me and for those of my ilk, might as well have been on the moon. NinetiesState College was artsy. And these
one-acts do the task of reliving moments for me, as a tangent to other 90s State College memories, of writing just for the hell of
it, and to achieve the short-term goal of indieState
College fame and fortune by making it with the Outlaws, and their minions.
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