Mackenzie Hurlbert – Managing Editor
Lights dimmed, audience members hushed, and actors found their marks last Friday night as the Southern Connecticut State University community gathered to enjoy senior Georgia Russell’s honors thesis, “The Voice Within.” Russell, a theatre major, wrote and directed the one-act play and said the experience was very rewarding.
“I think the experience was amazing,” said Russell. “Not many theses are creative theses and for me it was really great to experience the play from start to finish—from just the idea all the way through an entire performance—and seeing my words performed and the staging of the play. That was really, really a great experience for me.”
An honors thesis is an intense research or creative project that all honors students must complete in order to graduate from the honors college at Southern, but all students, honors or not, are welcome to complete an honors thesis. The student commits a semester to writing the prospectus, or research and plans for the thesis, and then uses the following semester to finish his or her thesis. While Russell is not part of the honors college, she wanted to challenge herself and explore her creativity.
Russell said her inspiration for the play came from her past interests in psychology. “I’ve always been very interested in why people are the way they are, and what makes them act a certain way and how those people fit into society, how society treats them.”
“I originally wanted it to be based on how people create a victim environment around themselves, and they constantly perpetuate the idea that ‘I’m a victim, I’m a victim, I can’t overcome these things because I’m a victim.’ But then, I was just talking to other people… and realized insecurities are a very common thing. It’s something that sets people apart from each other, not everyone has the same insecurities, but those insecurities can come about from experiences that everyone has. I really liked that aspect of the topic.”
When deciding where to start, Russell decided not to entirely make up her characters and their stories, so instead she conducted interviews. “I didn’t want to do book research in the sense that I didn’t feel that I would be able to find the rawness in a character that I wanted, so I decided that I’d have to interview people,” said Russell. “I decided I would start out with people that I knew, and that was a good start. And then I had only had about maybe 10 interviews after I had gotten to the people that I knew and decided it was time to branch out to the people I don’t know.”
“I came about having 50 interviews, which was great. It was a great pool of people,” said Russell.
After finishing her interviews and collection of stories, Russell began “meshing” together cohesive traits, insecurities, and back stories into characters. Each of her characters is inspired by multiple interviews, and in some cases Russell took actual dialogue or text messages from the true story and incorporated it into her play.
Russell said her research also included reading many books on playwriting, directing, and staging. “I learned a lot. I learned a lot about directing and a lot about writing, especially a lot about writing characters and following their arcs and stories and really trying to find all of the levels of emotion that regular people have,” said Russell.
The play, titled “The Voice Within,” featured five characters interacting with their inner voice or conscience, personified by a character named Egolina and played by Gwendolyn Kirkland. Relin, played by Teddy Hall, had insecurities about his faith and hated God for the death of his sister. Corpia, played by Cecilia Kurachi, hated herself and her body after suffering from sexual harassment and molestation by a coworker. Amal, played by Nathan Tracy, was an over-controlling boyfriend, constantly paranoid of the idea that his partner may leave him for another. Antanya, played by Jillian Fiedler, was a woman struggling with her self-worth and her desire to be wanted. Lastly, Famel, played by Ben Cooperman, was a man struggling with his insecurities about his dysfunctional family.
In the one-act play, each character is confronted by their inner voice, Egolina, and debates about how to change themselves or their thinking. By the end of the play, after flashbacks showing the moment or cause of each characters’ triggered insecurity, the characters regress back into their insecurities and deny changing. Russell felt this ending was necessary in order to be realistic and honest with her audience.
“I understand a lot of TV and books today, they do end with happy endings, but I just didn’t want a happy ending. Life is not like that. It’s tied up in a pretty bow and not everyone has a happy ending,” said Russell. “There is unhappiness in life, and that’s part of what makes us human.”
When asked if any scenes stood out to her as being the most successful, Russell said, “As a writer, I feel that the bullying scene with Corpia and Egolina went really well, and I feel like I was able to capture the bullying aspects of the human psyche and how we can do that to ourselves.”
“Staging-wise,” she added, “I was really happy with the molestation scene just because the creepiness level got to a point where even I was creeped out and I knew what was going to happen, so I felt that that was pretty successful seeing that.”
“I feel it was very successful, at least for an undergraduate thesis,” said Russell. “I felt that I had great actors and I felt that I had a lot of great support from my committee, especially from my advisor.”
“It was the best that it could possibly be,” said Russell.
