After a seven-year hiatus, the Purple Valley Play (PVP) Festival will return to the ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, marking its fourth-ever iteration. This year’s revival brings together thirteen ambitious student-written works, including 13 plays.
Many of the plays originated in THEA 266, an introductory playwriting class taught by Assistant Professor of Theatre Samer Al-Saber, who is also the festival’s artistic director. According to Al-Saber, the Festival’s return was sparked by student demand for more opportunities to produce original works of theatre — from page to stage. Students approached Dr. Amy Holzapfel, Chair and Professor of Theatre, with the idea. After Holzapfel brought the idea to the rest of the faculty, they decided to bring the Festival back.
According to Al-Saber, the department was game. “The department decided that we had all the elements we needed to give this massive undertaking a shot,” Al-Saber wrote in an email to the Record. “When we proposed it to our experienced team in the technical, scenic, and costume shops, they were enthusiastic. If you want me to credit this happening to one cause, I would say: the constellations of humans in the department right now.”
During the selection process, the student writers submitted their works anonymously to a selection committee composed of students, faculty, and staff. The committee reviewed play submissions over a two-week evaluation period without knowing which students wrote the pieces.
For many student writers, the ability to submit their work anonymously lowered the stakes and encouraged wider participation. “I didn’t even write these with the intention of them being produced,” Ethan Young ’28 said. “I was writing this as an assignment … and then the form for PVP came out, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll submit my play — why not?’”
Young is the only student also directing his own 10-minute play, titled Got My Back. The story centers two siblings attempting to change a car tire. Early in the play, the audience is told that one sibling will die by the end.
“I wanted the audience to know this moment is special, but I wanted them to think this is just 10 minutes in [the characters’] life,” Young said. “And you watch the last 10 minutes of this person’s life who’s just talking to his sister about random things and trying to change a car tire.”
For Dash Alschuler-Pierce ’28, Al-Saber’s class gave him the confidence to submit his play.
“[I was] trying to write something to just express myself,” Alschuler-Pierce said. “When you’ve never done it before … you’re sort of wandering through the dark. What this class is really good at is just giving you the confidence to start doing it yourself.”
In Alschuler-Pierce’s 10-minute play titled Power in the Hands of Monkeys and set at a fictional college campus, the character Dr. Nancy Fielding is called to the Provost’s office, where three male administrators ask to discuss a “serious issue.” Much of the play is about how educators are suffocated by the institutions that they work in, according to Alschuler-Pierce.
Stella Rothfeld ’26 has had playwriting experience before, but as a student in Al-Saber’s class, she saw how his teaching made the art form more accessible for those starting out. “It’s a lot less daunting to write a 10-minute play than it is to write a full-length play,” Rothfeld said. “I think Samer has done a lot to kind of increase the playwright culture on campus. Honestly, he’s a very supportive professor, and he really believes in his students. I feel like I’ve seen a big difference before and after he’s come here.”
Rothfeld wrote one of the festival’s two one-act plays, titled Paradise Island, based on her experience watching reality TV. The play is directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Erica Terpening-Romeo, making it one of only two plays at the Festival that is directed by a faculty member.
“I feel like whenever I’m watching reality TV, I’m already thinking about how messed up everything is and how many concerns I have,” said Rothfeld. “But I’m sort of hypocritical, because I have all these issues with reality TV, but I also watch it a lot. So I’m like, ‘Am I complicit in that?’”
This year, the Festival will be split into two separate programs: a “Purple billing” and a “Gold billing,” each including a completely different set of student-written plays. The Festival will run from April 23 to 25 at the Adams Memorial Theatre in the ’62 Center.
Al-Saber noted that the process of moving from draft to production offers students a rare opportunity to see their works fully realized on stage.
“The ability of our students and faculty to work together in this kind of developmental relationship in theater is not only fantastic but rare in academia,” Al-Saber wrote. “I hope that our audiences will walk away impressed by the incredible talent of Williams College students.”
