Generally, it’s best to avoid fire, but the UNM’s Words Afire Festival is encouraging its audience to feel the burn.
The festival pairs dramatic writing graduate students with internationally renowned directors who transform the students’ screenplays into lively, full-blown productions.
Director Elaine Avila said she brings directors who have national or international reputations because they are bridges for students into professional theater networks.
“I wanted them to find … their tribe of people they are going to work with in their careers,” she said.
This year, three of the four playwrights won awards at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Georgina Escobar won the Theatre for Young Audiences Playwriting Award; Riti Sachdeva won the Quest for Peace Playwriting Award; and Law Chavez won the Latino Playwriting Award.
Avila said the program imports diverse writers and engages them in a rigorous writing and rewriting process. She said the program’s writers have won a major national award every year since 2003.
“It’s very uncommon, so it’s something really great about our program,” she said.
It’s also rare for a dramatic writing program to offer graduates a full production of their plays, Escobar said. But she said theater is a collaborative art, and it’s essential to learn production because it’s a professional playwright’s job.
“For a writer to move into this new phase of theater where self-production is really the way to go, it’s not just us sitting over a screen and typing out words and giving it off to the world,” she said.
Second-year students’ plays are workshopped and rehearsed over the week. Students rewrite their screenplay before, during and after rehearsal, and a director helps them edit. Actors will read the final script to the audience.
This year there are three full productions, Escobar’s “The Ruin,” Sachdeva’s “La Fea: A FlamenChoreoMyth” and Nic Wehrwein’s “Back Home.”
Chavez’s play “The Story of Caballos Muertos” will be a workshop reading and is free to students. All performances are free for graduate students.
Tlaloc Rivas, director of “Caballos Muertos,” said the festival allows writers to expose their work to theaters, agents and professionals in the business.
“You really want a festival like this to launch them in a way, to launch their work and their voices,” he said. “The festival itself is building sort of a national profile. We may not realize it, but people know about the festival.”
Wehrwein said being a part of the production process helped him detach from his work, something professional playwrights must do when a director takes over.
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“I think there’s more surrender in this, at least for me,” he said. “You kind of have to step back and go, ‘This is out of my hands now.’”
Escobar said disengaging from her work is difficult, but it’s clear that collaborators are motivated to create the best possible production.
“It’s really showing us a piece of the real world, pairing us up with somebody who does this as a job, because we don’t want to go out there thinking that what we do is not a job,” she said.
