Student Play, Hakugame, Offers Hope for The Arts

Reported by: Aurora Biggers

Photographed by: Danny Walker

NEWBERG, Ore.—After a year that closed theaters, cancelled most shows, and caused us to renew our appreciation for classic movies and television reruns (did you, too, realize you should invest in better couch cushions?), it’s comforting to know that the arts aren’t dead. George Fox University’s (GFU) own Skylar Rae and Lydia Crist wrote and directed a play, which was performed over Zoom as part of the theater program’s spring play reading series.

Rae, a theater and entrepreneurship major graduating in the spring, says this is her “first real foray into writing a complete full length script,” and her intention with this production is to give actors who haven’t really performed since COVID-19 a chance to perform. She’s also using the reading to hear the script aloud and workshop it for when she eventually shares the play with other directors in the future.

The play centers on a young girl who is taken prisoner by her country’s corrupt authoritarian empire. In exchange for her life, the girl agrees to become an apprentice to the current executioner. Rae says the concept came to her in a dream, or perhaps more aptly, a nightmare.

“What struck me about the dream was the characters, and specifically this young girl who was put into some dangerous and unsafe circumstances and had to become an adult very quickly,” Rae said, “and to compensate for these circumstances, she has to become very assertive.”

Rae wrote the play while interning at Michael Curry Designs. Their work is recognized in the puppets in The Lion King Broadway show, among other prominent productions. Rae included scenes and characters in her play that would highlight puppetry and action on stage, hence the montages of sword-play training and the giant wolf-demon that appears to the protagonist throughout the show. Rae says her vision for the future of theater is to “push the boundaries of things that can’t be done on screen and challenge what can be done on stage.”

For her, this means utilizing the medium to its fullest extent, incorporating more action and featuring the kind of stories that may be expected in film but are rarely seen on stage. “Something I’m really interested in is making theater more accessible to a wider audience that would not normally engage with theater,” Rae said.

Due to COVID-19, Rae’s dream for Hakugame--live action, giant puppetry, and nightmarish drama--had to be displayed a little differently. Using some costuming, minimal lighting effects, props, and narration of stage directions, the cast presented a full reading of Hakugame over Zoom.

Rae says she hopes viewers went away from it and found themselves still thinking about it.

Hakugame was the first in a series of spring play readings that will be put on by GFU’s theater department. While the reading had a few technical hiccups, the theatrics were still there, and it felt superb to experience theater again. With GFU’s recent announcement to eliminate the theater major, theater students are left with “a lot of emotions,” as Rae put it, but if this performance showed us anything, it is that theater isn’t “unnecessary.”