Rider University is set to present its inaugural Spring New Play Festival in the Spitz Studio Theater, Feb. 6 through 8.
The festival is being curated by David Lee White, the associate artistic director and resident playwright at Passage Theater in Trenton. It will feature new plays by area playwrights performed by Rider University Students at staged readings. The readings will be followed by an audience discussion.
White’s Real True Crime, directed by Adam Immerwahr, will be performed on Friday, Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m. The plot follows Maddie, a 40 year old divorcée who never finished her graduate school thesis and now sells coffee at Wawa. Between playing the lottery and talking about true crime stories, Maddie doesn’t have much of a life. She’s waiting for a sign. When a masked intruder named Charlie holds up the Wawa and asks Maddie to come on a crime spree with him, she embarks on a journey that leads her to a secluded cabin in the woods where she meets a philandering college professor, a female punk-rocker and a former child actor turned self-help guru. Real True Crime is a play about middle-age, the search for meaning, sex, drugs and men in giant penguin suits.
Ivan Fuller’s Going Home to Die No More, directed by Will Steinberger, will be performed on Saturday, Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m. The play takes place during in the American Civil War, when three women disguise themselves as men and follow their loved ones into the fight. Going Home to Die No More traces their intimate, epic journey from the comic process of transformation, through the battlefields and into the darkness of Andersonville.
Fuller is a professor of theatre and associate dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Rider University.
Ken Kaissar and John F. Kline’s Stabilized Tubulence, directed by Jillian Carucci, will be performed on Sunday, Feb. 8 at 2 p.m. When Fred McAlister’s ground-breaking discovery changes the face of modern sciences, his research partner, an established and recognized physicist, receives sole credit. Fred struggles with whether or not he should put up a fight. Stabilized Turbulence explores the mystery behind creative inspiration, asking the question, do we discover great ideas or do great ideas discover us?
Kaissar teacher playwriting and theatre history at Rider University and Stockton College.
Admission to the festival is free.
Rider University is located at 2038 Lawrenceville Road in Lawrence.
More information is online at rider.edu/arts.
