Festival Gives Plays Their First Test : CalArts: The student-run event will showcase 20 works chosen from 49 submissions. They will be performed from Wednesday to May 3.

“The play’s the thing” for a score of playwrights at CalArts’ 1992 New Plays Festival.

The festival is a fairly new idea for the college and a major steppingstone for the writers in the development of their plays. Most of the writers are seeing their work on the stage for the first time.

From Wednesday through May 3, 20 playwrights--18 students plus two CalArts graduates--will see their works put before audiences. From afternoon to evening, almost hourly, audiences will be moving from theater to theater on the campus to see plays of various lengths.

“The thing that’s really important to the festival is that it’s run by students,” says Lou Florimonte, who teaches playwriting and who is one of two heads of the inter-school directing program. “There’s a student manager, a student committee, and they make the decision on what plays will be done.”

The festival, which started about four years ago, began small, Florimonte says. “We had a lot of people who were writing, and I decided the best way for them to take a script apart was to put it together. Everybody had to write a one-act play, whether it was good or bad, three drafts and then a final draft. That year, there were 60 people writing plays.”

Then Florimonte got together with Sandy MacKendrick, who teaches film directing at CalArts--he directed such films as “The Man in the White Suit” with Alec Guinness and “Sweet Smell of Success” with Burt Lancaster--with whom Florimonte developed the inter-school directing program.

They decided that it was important for directing students to work on new plays with the writers present. That first year, two plays were done, followed by six the second year and 15 the next. Florimonte says: “Last year, when Matt Almos came on board as student manager, we had 54 scripts submitted, and 24 or 25 were done.”

Almos, 23, is in the second year of the master of fine arts directing program at CalArts. Off-campus, he has directed two of his plays, one from last year’s festival, at Original Theatre Works in Cerritos, and last summer was assistant director of Grove Shakespeare Festival’s production of “The Taming of the Shrew.”

A committee of seven students from various CalArts schools selects the plays, Almos says, and this year each committee member read all 49 submissions. “We had someone from the music school, someone who specialized in dramatic structure, some who are more interested in interdisciplinary or experimental stuff, such as pieces that incorporate elements from all the artistic disciplines, music, film, video, dance,” he says.

Florimonte has had plays produced in New York, off- and off-off-Broadway, at the Changing Scene Theatre in Denver, and is at work on a play commissioned by Denver’s Germinal Stage. He agrees that pulling all these disciplines together opens new pathways for young writers.

“One of the interesting writers,” Florimonte says, “is a musician who’s been working for several years on pieces that involve actors and instruments and music. That has opened up another window for people who had been, understandably, narrowly focused on their own training as actors or directors. That was important to us.

“As a result,” Almos adds, “some of the scripts submitted are very traditional dramatic narratives, well-constructed and orchestrated. Others are involved with experimenting with a different theatrical language, non-linear or musical, or exploration of language.”

Florimonte agrees. “The other important thing about the festival,” he says, “is that we don’t know where it will lead. I’m leery about over-institutionalizing it, or over-formularizing it. It’s got to be free and unencumbered by the institute. People getting out of school in the arts, especially in theater, and in writing for the theater, as Artaud said, should have a healthy contempt for his medium.

“Writers have to learn that, at this point, theater has been inadequate, in that the world will finally know what theater is when they see their work. It’s not just making new plays, but because of the current state of American theater, it’s really redefining theater, discovering theater. It’s in a state of flux; it’s reinventing theater. Somebody has to find something to pump life into it. A good deal of the theater we see today is simply movies of the week put on stage.”

Florimonte admits that writers need all the media. “Today every writer, and every director, has to be ambidextrous. You’ve got to go where the work is, where your passion leads you. That was the reason Sandy and I started the inter-school directing program because the directors got training in film and in theater, the idea being that they would be completely ambidextrous when they get out of here. They could go wherever they get a job, and understand what the media have in common, and what is different about them.”

Almos finds the festival exhilarating. “Last year, a play I wrote was in the festival, and I also directed another play, and assistant-directed another play. I was working on three shows. I was rehearsing around the clock. There was one night when I had three performances back-to-back. It was a hectic, but a really exciting time. It really changed my life.

“It got me excited about new plays. And I got kind of hooked on the community that was established during that time, a group of artists working on 20 different shows, but toward a common goal. And one of the fascinating things about the festival is the migration of the audience from theater to theater, comparing notes on the different shows, keeping a score card. The audience becomes a part of the community.”

The festival has upped the flow of Florimonte’s adrenaline, also. “One year, 60 students wrote four drafts. I read 240 plays that year. It was so exciting that I’m actually writing again for the first time in a number of years,” he says.

1992 CalArts New Plays Festival runs from Wednesday to May 3 at CalArts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia. Performances begin at 4 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 3 p.m. Fridays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; call for playing times of individual plays. Tickets are free, but reservations are necessary. For information, call (805) 253-7800 or (818) 362-2315.