Six of One: New Play Festival sees Melissa Oei come full circle, in directorial debut
A Studio 58 grad herself, the theatre artist was excited to work with acting students freed of their masks
Studio 58 presents Six of One: New Play Festival March 31 to April 8
STUDIO 58’S LATEST production Six of One: New Play Festival is comparable to a tasting menu, says one of the show’s directors, Melissa Oei: the variety of styles and genres featured guarantees that anyone coming to watch will leave the theatre satisfied.
The work presents a collection of six short form plays divided into two programs, A and B, with a seventh play interwoven throughout both programs. Featuring written work and acting performances by students in their final few terms of Langara College’s three-year professional theatre program, Six of One: New Play Festival marks a return to unmasked performances for Studio 58 following the lifting of pandemic restrictions.
Oei, a Studio 58 alumna who is directing Program B, says she was surprised by the differences that were sparked in her directorial process by being able to observe people’s complete range of expressions again.
“The first day that the mask mandate was lifted at the school, and the students were taking their masks off in rehearsal, and I saw their full faces—it really shook things up,” says Oei. “It actually changed the way I was directing them as individuals, because all of a sudden I could see their entire face. Things clicked in for me in terms of who these people were.”
Six of One: New Play Festival is Oei’s professional directorial debut, a pivotal moment for her that has been delayed by pandemic restrictions. When B.C.’s first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 caused most in-person activities to shudder to a halt, Oei was in the midst of directing another production at Studio 58 titled FourPlay: New Work by Excited Writers. The piece premiered online, but was never mounted on stage.
Having spent most of her career as an actor, Oei says she has always been encouraged by those around her to take up directing. When her friend and colleague Keara Barne asked her to direct her one-woman fringe show Traveltheatrics prior to the pandemic, Oei began to consider directing as a venture she could succeed in. Since then, she has delved into other small-scale directorial projects, including a production of Romeo and Juliet for Place Des Arts’ summer teen program.
For Oei, it was a full-circle moment when Studio 58’s artistic director Courtenay Dobbie offered her a role directing a program for Six of One: New Play Festival.
“It felt like it was really the right time for me and where I was in my career,” Oei says. “When someone presents an opportunity and they believe in me enough to offer me the job, then I feel like maybe they see something there — and why not go for it?”
Sarah Conway, a student actor in her final year at Studio 58, is also debuting her professional work in Six of One: New Play Festival. Her short form play titled Budding is opening Program A, which is directed by another Studio 58 alumna, Quelemia Sparrow. Budding is the first piece Conway has written that’s been produced and performed on stage.
Conway says that the inspiration for Budding comes from her experience living as a person in her early 20s who’s just starting her career and figuring out how to find her way in a new world of unpredictable possibilities.
“The heightened nature of so much of our media and art didn’t reflect my life back to me,” Conway says. “And I felt like I had life experiences that weren’t as magical, or weren’t as luscious, or as heightened, or as unreal as a lot of media had led me to believe they might be. So I wanted to write something that celebrated the beauty of mundanity, and the beauty in the ordinary — and the uncertainty that we’re all feeling.”
Aside from crafting Budding, Conway is also acting in fellow student playwright Liam Dignam’s piece Family Christmas, which will be shown in Program B. She says that translating acting skills learned over Zoom lessons into live rehearsals and performances has been a challenging process.
“The wildest difference is just intimacy, even,” Conway says. “We used to do intimacy things through a plastic screen — we would pretend. And now people can touch, and people can have that collective sense that we’ve been missing out on.”
Oei says that despite the variations from play to play, the majority of them contain a similarly circular storyline of loss, grief, and ultimately, hope.
“I don’t think it’s really responsible to pull an audience into the theatre to lay down some hard truths and then just make them feel hopeless at the end, you know,” Oei says. “I think of all things, hope is the best thing that you can leave the theatre with. And even though all of these plays are talking about vastly different things, and are tackling very different subject matter, they all really leave me with that little nugget of hope.”
Related Articles
