Staged readings of 34-year-old local playwright Joseph Zettelmaier’s plays entitled “All Childish Things, Episodes I, II and III,” will be presented on campus this weekend at the Quirk-Sponberg Theatre.
In an interview Monday, Zettelmaier, who is also a drama composition teacher at Eastern Michigan University, talked about his three plays, which are heavily influenced by the Star Wars trilogy.
“It’s about three lifelong friends, Max, Dave and Carter, who are in their late twenties, early thirties now. They’ve been friends since they were four, and they’ve kind of been inseparable their whole lives and the thing that brought them together as kids and still does is their love of Star Wars.
“The first play is all about their attempts to rob the Kenner toy store of millions of dollars worth of collectibles and sell it to an anonymous buyer. And, of course, everything goes completely wrong because nerds shouldn’t commit crime,” he said.
“The second and third plays kind of deal with the prolonged fallout of what happens in the first one. The fourth character who’s a big part of it as well, who’s in all [three plays], is the girlfriend of one of the three characters, who the other two characters hate because she’s breaking up the trio,” he said.
At first glance, the plot of the first episode might seem similar to a movie released last year entitled “Fan Boys.” But Zettelmaier said, “My play was written and came out long before Fan Boys — my play was written 2004, Fan Boys only came out last year.
“At first I was really hyper-concerned that it was going to, that we were going to just covaer the exact same stuff, but it’s actually really different on a lot of levels, ” he said.
According to Shannon Ferrante, the reading’s director, “All Childish Things” does a good job of saying something specific for our generation.
“It’s a unique play because I think we haven’t seen a lot of playwrights come out that really speak to our generation. Theater is kind of becoming a dying art form because it’s all, you know, created for blue hairs and we’re still doing Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and all that. So I think with this play the characters really sound like people — they jumped off the page for me — and they’re dealing with issues that we deal with, and I think it’s really fun, so I think we’ll see a younger audience,” she said.
Luna Alexander, a junior studying theater at EMU, is playing Kendra, Carter’s girlfriend, and said it was a great opportunity.
“I’m a geek. Princess Leia was the reason I wanted to do theater since I was five, so this is amazing, just to see how it really shows a different perspective on how people see Star Wars and geeks. It bridges the gap,” she said.
“It connects to ‘super-fans,’ but it doesn’t matter so much because it’s mostly about friendship and camaraderie,” said Charles Jabour, a senior at EMU studying arts management who plays Bobby in the reading.
Despite the fact it’s a staged reading, the audience will still “get to see the play.” It will just be in a lower production cost format, Zettelmaier said.
“With a staged reading, you have no time and no budget, basically. We do the performance, the actors will have script in hand, but they’ll still have full action. They’ll be moving around and utilizing set pieces; you know, whatever we have there. It’s a very barebones production,” he said.
The staged reading of Episode I will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, Episode II at 7 p.m. on Saturday and Episode III at 3 p.m. on Sunday, all at Quirk-Sponberg Theatre. Tickets are $7 per show.
