The Barnard thesis plays, Saint Plays and Cahoot's Macbeth, are playing at the Minor Latham Theatre in Milbank Hall this upcoming Thursday through Saturday. The thesis plays are completely student-run productions put together by the Columbia-Barnard theatre department. 

I interviewed the director of the Saint Plays to find out more about the show. "I'm Katie Lupica. I'm a senior at Columbia, and I am the director of the Saint Plays. The Saint Plays are actually a cycle of over 100 short plays based on the lives of Catholic Saints. They're all written by the playwright, Erik Ehn, and for this production we will be doing four of them. And they are about the saints Joan of Arc, St. George, St. Agnes and St. Christopher," she told me with a happy, tired, overworked expression. Katie took advantage of her role as student director to portray the plays in her own perspective. She told me, "The stories are sometimes very biographical about the saints and sometimes very distant from the conventional stories. It's a lot of experimental staging, flying and dancing and singing, that sort of thing."

Along with impressive staging techniques, students working on the thesis plays put emotion and creativity into their sets. I interviewed Rolando Rodriguez, the set director of the other thesis play, Cahoot's Macbeth, and asked what part of the play most inspired his set design. He described that, "Cahoot's Macbeth where the actors are speaking english but then you have this character, easy, who comes in speaking a language most of the audience would not understand and eventually most of the characters begin to speak the same language." From this scene, Ricardo created a whole world in which the play exists. He went on to describe, "I took license from this moment of the play to research surrealist images and get a surrealist taste in the set and that is where most of the destroyed and deformed shapes of the set comes from because I wanted to highlight this theatrical and very imaginative and surreal world that is of Cahoot's Macbeth."

From flying actors to surrealist sets, the thesis plays promise to put on quite a show, so don't forget to get your tickets free at the Columbia TIC.