by Blythe Ford, Messenger Staff Writer

Enid Graham’s new play “How to Save Ourselves” premiered for the very first time on Feb. 26 at the Proctor Hill Theatre in the Tennessee Williams Center, and performances will continue through March 2. “How to Save Ourselves” follows a group of young, college-age people volunteering at a struggling food bank as they learn to work together, even as they are faced with personal biases, community challenges, and the effects of severe weather. This production is in partnership with local nonprofits that deal with the issue of food insecurity, and a panel discussing the topic followed Thursday’s performance; the members of the panel included Alyse Getty, Food Mission Director at Morton Memorial United Methodist Church, Stephanie Colchado Kelley, Director of Growing Roots, Sara McIntyre, Sustainability Manager at the Office of Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability at the University of the South, and Jess Wilson, Farmer and volunteer President of the TN Young Farmers Coalition. There is a display in the Tennessee Williams Center lobby featuring these organizations and how to get involved in local efforts to combat food insecurity and climate change, which will remain while the play is in production.

The play was commissioned by The Farm Theater, an organization that offers education and mentorship opportunities for both actors and playwrights. Each year as part of their College Collaboration program, they select an early career playwright to write a play specifically for college students, focusing on issues that concern young people, which is then produced in the academic year by colleges and student actors. Formed in 2014, Farm Theater Artistic Director Padraic Lillis explained that the program “was created to create development opportunities for early career playwrights that had demonstrated a unique voice, excellent writers, and were ready to take the next step in their career,” and was also intended to help young artists develop their skills and confidence, “because it is important for student artists to work on new work. It is empowering to the student to know that their contribution shaped the script and will have a lasting impact on the life [of the] play.” To that end, students begin their participation in the program with a workshop in the summer before the academic year the play will be produced, expanding their skills under the mentorship of professional actors. The playwright works with the students and all those involved in the production from start to finish. According to Lillis, “The most valuable thing for a playwright’s growth is to have their plays produced in front of a live audience. This process allows for the play to remain in process throughout an entire academic year. The playwrights have a rich experience of collaborating with multiple artistic teams at each school that strengthen their play, and the year-long process strengthens them as artists.”

Graham, this year’s selected playwright, has had a successful acting career including roles on Broadway and in TV series, and has written 12 other full-length plays. She was invited to submit a topic on which to write a play for the College Collaboration program, and “was torn between proposing to write about the climate catastrophe and the current epidemic of loneliness, so I decided to propose them both. As I wrote, I saw how the two topics are intertwined, and I think I’ve come up with a play that wrestles with both issues.” The idea to set it in a food distribution center came as a result of her own volunteer work and deep thought about how humanity deals with vital resources like food and water in times of fear and uncertainty. She wanted to create a play that both explored these issues and provided a sense of hope; in her words, “I knew that if young people were going to spend their precious hours working on a play, then I wanted to give them one that wrestled with today’s world, but also contained hope — one that didn’t pretend our problems were easy to solve, but that pointed at a way to begin solving them. Can we work together to find solutions? Can we sustain hope in the face of tragedy? Can we, even with all of our differences, join forces to help others?” She found her own answers in her experience volunteering at a food distribution center in her neighborhood in NYC, during which she was thrown together with a group of complete strangers to box up food for families. They all had to work together to efficiently package the food in order to fulfill the number of boxes requested, and according to Graham “I was interested to see how we all, with our own personality quirks and various limitations, learned to work together. I was inspired by how, despite our differences, we managed to form a unit and were able to work together to help improve food insecurity for some families in our city. And then I thought…hmm, this could be a play!” This sense of hope and collaboration is also what she wants the audience to experience while watching “How to Save Ourselves.” When asked what she thought community members should know before attending, she said there’s no need for special knowledge but that “I do hope that, as they come, they bring with them the excitement of having the chance to see something completely new. We all love the classics, but there is something especially exciting about new work, plays that are written to specifically respond to our times and that are fresh and untested. The theatre is a totally collaborative art form, playwrights and actors and directors and designers all work together to create the show, but the ultimate collaboration is between the production and the audience. I hope our audiences will arrive feeling the thrill of being among the first to participate in that collaboration.”

This year, the University of the South is participating in the College Collaboration program with the enthusiastic involvement of Professor Sarah Hamilton, who is directing the production of “How to Save Ourselves.” The production stars Amelia Barakat as Angela, Dante Studenko Chamorro as Antonio, Eleora Ephrem as Marci, Joe Harned as Colin, Bryce Johnson as Jake, Trinity Reddick as Rook, Pete Stone as Stephen, and Sofia Tripoli as Tamara. Grayson Davis and Hannah Diehl are understudies. Hamilton explained that as the first-ever production of “How to Save Ourselves,” these performances in Sewanee play a unique role in the creation of the play. “Unlike other forms of writing, plays are created to be embodied and shared with an audience.” Hamilton said, “When a playwright is working on a new piece, the best way for them to understand how their play is working is to see it performed on its feet. This production of How to Save Ourselves gives the playwright, Enid Graham, a chance to do that. From here, she’ll revise the work based on what she’s learned through our production process, and then the play will have another production at Centre College later this spring. The process repeats again.” She is thrilled that Sewanee is participating in this process not only for what it means for both student actors and the playwright, but also because of its larger implications. The University of the South was bequeathed the royalties from Tennessee Williams’ plays in his will, with the intention of cultivating new plays. “His most famous works such as ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ and ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ are only known to us today because theatres decided to take a risk and produce them when they were still new and untested,” Hamilton explained. “Our production of ‘How to Save Ourselves’ is exactly the kind of thing Tennessee Williams would have wanted. By investing in the development and production of new work, we provide opportunities for plays by emerging writers to become a part of the canon. As play development opportunities dwindle across the country, this is more important now than it’s ever been. It is an honor for me, the students, and my colleagues to follow in Tennessee Williams’ footsteps by producing new plays in his namesake facility on Sewanee’s campus.”

Performances of “How to Save Ourselves” are at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 28-March 1 and 2:30 p.m., March 2, in the Proctor Hill Theatre in the Tennessee Williams Center. Tickets are free, but space is limited. You can reserve your tickets online at Eventbrite <https://www.eventbrite.com/e/h...;utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp>.