Channeling their inner Scorseses

College students take turns at directing

A series of short plays will cover everything this week from the inner workings of the human psyche to pancakes.
Allen County Community College students Nachele Gonsalez, Lindsey Jarvis, Elizabeth Otto, Paige Schauf, Garrett Skidmore and Chris Yackle are taking the helm for the college’s annual student-directed one-act plays, which premiere at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the ACCC Theatre.
Tickets for the three-night performances — it repeats Friday and Saturday — are available in advance at Iola Pharmacy for $6 for adults and $4 for students. Students from ACCC will be admitted free of charge.
Each of the young directors spoke about the challenges and benefits of sitting in the director’s chair, as well as directing their fellow schoolmates on stage.
Jarvis wrote and directed “Commercial: The Play,” a spoof of many commercials shown on late night television.
Schauf penned and di-rected “And a Blueberry Muffin,” a story about a young woman seeking refuge in a bookstore.
Skidmore is directing “Id,” a play featuring the bickering components of the lead character’s personality.
Yackle, meanwhile, is sitting in the director’s chair for “Pancakes,” the story of a pair of roommates and — what else — their affinity for pancakes.
Gonsalez and Otto are serving as co-directors for “English: It’s Where the Words Are,” the story of a bickering young couple in Brooklyn.

JARVIS CAME up with the idea for “Commercial” after watching one too many ads on television.
Her one-act includes a number of parodies, spoofing such infamous ads as Cash 4 Gold, Priceline and the “Twilight” movie series.
“I thought about it for a while before I realized I knew I had to make fun of them,” Jarvis said. Once the idea for “Commercial” was in place, the ideas began to flow freely. The entire process of writing the script took less than two weeks, Jarvis said.
Her cast includes fellow directors Schauf, Gonsalez and Otto, as well as Mack Melvin, Jon Eddy, Sean Swanson, Desiree Mason, Jessica Truitt and Billy Wicks.
The students also will do short commercial spoofs in between the other one-acts, Jarvis said, with plenty of improvisation and audience interaction.
“It’s been fun,” Jarvis said, but there’s been a major challenge. “With all of the actors my age, it was difficult at times to get them to trust me and trust my direction.” As rehearsals progressed, that sense of trust grew, Jarvis said.

SCHAUF wrote “And a Blueberry Muffin” over the span of about a month.
The story follows a somewhat frantic woman who enters a bookstore because she’s being followed — or at least she thinks she is.
Her cast features Alicia Strawder, Rachel Wiley, Eli Waddle, Miles Collins, Elizabeth Novotny and Savannah Haner, a group Schauf described as “amazing.”
“One of the things I told them at the start was that while it was important for them to do well, it was just as important for them to have fun doing it.”
Schauf incorporated a few unusual directing techniques to keep the rehearsals energetic.
“One time we did the play as if everyone was a zombie,” Schauf said.
The story has a few unpredictable plot twists, Schauf noted, and a rather unusual character.
“Yep, it has a dinosaur,” she said.
“There were a bad ideas I had to cut from the play,” Schauf said. “I was thinking about putting in an invisible character, but how could you portray that?”

MUCH OF THE play “Id” takes place in the mind of its lead character, Daniel.
The personality ingredients include morality, passion and ego, and their conflicts tend to force Daniel into some tense situations, Skidmore said.
“I really enjoyed working with this play,” he said. “I was hoping to find a funny story, and this script made me laugh out loud when I read it.”
Id stars Miles Collins, Emily Wullenschneider, Valeree Winslow, Stacy Raby, Sean Swanson, Paul Vernon, Rochelle McGhee, Isiah Smith and Savana Van Vleck.

YACKLE found an easy impetus for his play, “Pancakes.”
“I like pancakes,” he said. “I mean, who doesn’t?”
The play features a pair of roommates, who have some similar traits — they both love pancakes, for example — with one glaring difference: one is considerably wealthier than the other.
Yackle’s cast of just two, Darrell Appelhanz and Jamarious Wicker, made the directing process easy, Yackle said.
“We’ve worked well together,” he said. “Everybody connected. They’ve made it pretty easy.”

OTTO AND Gonsalez agreed that working together as co-directors was made easier by the duo’s similar personalities.
“We’re usually on the same page when it comes to what we want to see on stage,” Gonsalez said. “And I really liked the humor in this play; it’s kind of odd.”
“English” takes place in 1970s Brooklyn and features a young couple and typical couple disagreements.
“The hard part was getting them to master their Brooklyn accents,” Otto said. “Plus, there’s lots of fighting; lots of energy.”
Their cast, like Yackle’s, has only two characters, Ben Olson and Shelby Cruz.
But like Gonsalez and Otto, Olson and Cruz have meshed well on stage, making directing easier.
“Really, the biggest challenge for us was finding the right outfits,” Gonsalez said. “We want people to realize this was the 1970s.”

FOR EACH OF the directors, working behind the scenes will benefit them when they return to acting in future productions.
All had leading roles in previous ACCC productions; they will again in late April for the final play of the year, “Arabian Nights.”
“I’m definitely going to listen to my director better,” Schauf joked.
All also agreed that taking part in creating a play from scratch has given them a better understanding of such things as character and scene development.
Skidmore, for example, acted in two one-acts in ACCC’s 2009 production.
“Both of my directors got stressed out at times,” he recalled. Some stress grows as opening night nears, Skidmore admitted.
“My biggest concern was to make changes so that everybody was comfortable,” he said.
The entire process has been enjoyable, Gonsalez said.
“There were days that I’d have two rehearsals and I’d go in thinking, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ but by the time the night was over, we’d be having so much fun that I knew this was what I wanted to do.”