Undergrad Underground
May 3, 2024: 8:30 PM
Ashamu Dance Studio
83 Waterman Street
Providence RI 02912
Tickets will be available online beginning
at 9AM the morning of each performance.
Summer, Capsizing
by Irene Zhiyi Chen ‘25
Set in an international school in China, Summer, Capsizing (working title) is an English-Mandarin bilingual play about six high schoolers fighting to prevent their queer American teacher from being fired and to preserve the school’s only theatre program. They have to work through the intrinsic differences within the group in order to collectively navigate the school’s muddy sea of sociopolitical values. However, as they find themselves thrown into the center of the school’s culture wars, will they uphold their cause or let it be overturned?
Irene makes theatre that dives into in-between spaces with powerful tenderness, searching for belonging in relation to migration and multilingual experiences. Irene’s primary interests are theatre education, playwriting, sound and projections design, and intimacy choreography. Irene also loves partnered dancing, cats, and other squishy things.
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Rocks and Geodes
by Lydia Riess '24
Three 9-year-olds—two girls and one boy—embark on a rocks and geodes field trip in upstate New York, but are preoccupied by make-believe games, hunger for validation, and the straight up weirdness of being a kid. Meanwhile, their respective chaperone mothers (unsuccessfully) cling to their sanity in the midst of passive aggression, parental politics, and totally different approaches to sex-ed. Isn’t it strange to have a body? Isn’t it odd that it grows?
Lydia Riess (she/her) is a writer, actor, and director for film and theater born and raised in New York City. She uses observations of the people around her to create work that explores the complexities and contradictions present in all of us, hoping to foster confrontation with the self and empathy for others. She writes and performs with Brown’s sketch comedy group, Out of Bounds, and her former plays include Scorpions Don’t Bite (Providence Fringe Festival), RUFUS (Something on the Green), and The Ikea Play (The National Theater Institute).
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Sisters of the Sublime
by Cosima Gardey '24
Three young nuns contend with their inevitable feelings of doom, boredom, curiosity and lust from a convent somewhere in France, sometime in the medieval period. The arrival of a new sister and her dark, promiscuous past sends the sisters on diverging paths towards their own personal ecstatic revelations. Some people want to be left alone, others want to have visions, and some just really want to be touched.
Cosima Gardey (she/her) is a theatre writer, director and actor originally from London. She appreciates the sensorial and sensual aspects of medieval christian art, finding both a deep sense of wonder and humour in its imagery. She likes to think and write about human desire in all its forms.