Carolina Folk Plays 2020

Four One-Act Plays
By Cole Kordus, Emily Jane MacKillop, Sorcha de Faoite, and Sam Bible-Sullivan.

With an Introduction by Mark Perry

SYNOPSIS:

'Carolina Folk Plays 2020' is a collection of four one-act plays written by students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With settings ranging from a modern backyard to a 19th Century bar, from a Polish farm to an Irish basketball court, this compilation seeks to renew and continue the tradition of folk drama innovated at UNC in the early 20th Century.

  • "A Better Life" by Cole Kordus"

  • “The Legend of Peter Dromgoole" by Emily Jane MacKillop

  • "Kiss Fell" by Sorcha de Faoite

  • "Ain't That Just The Way" by Sam Bible-Sullivan

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

"The tradition of “Carolina Folk Plays” began just about a century ago here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That was when Professor Frederick Koch (1870-1944) was recruited from North Dakota to UNC by then-president Edward K. Graham.  This was 1918, just as a world war was peaking and a pandemic was flaring.

“Known as the founder of the Carolina Playmakers and the UNC Department of Dramatic Art, “Proff” Koch fostered a little, local revolution by turning the attention of UNC’s playmaking energies onto “folk” drama. This would have national repercussions as the influence of the Carolina Playmakers spread. A man of considerable energy and creative output, he described the notion of folk drama and the Carolina process in an essay called “American Folk Drama in the Making”:

“ ‘From the first our particular interest in North Carolina has been the use of native materials and the making of fresh dramatic forms. We have found that if the young writer observes the locality with which he is most familiar and interprets it faithfully it may show him the way to the universal. If he can see the interestingness of the lives of those about him with understanding and imagination, with wonder, why may he not interpret that life in significant images for others—perhaps for all? It has been so in all lasting art. The materials were drawn by each writer from scenes familiar and near, often from remembered adventures of his youth, from folk tales and the common tradition, and from present-day life…’

“The vigor and productivity of this early period of the Carolina Playmakers is undeniable. Koch and company fostered not only a harmonious collective, but they brought women, African Americans, and people of different nationalities into an all-white, predominantly male campus in ways that must have been quite a challenge in the Jim Crow South. They also did not keep that work hidden away in Chapel Hill. Through publishing, through touring, they scattered that vision abroad and changed the American theatre.

“Over the years, the focus on student playwriting would ebb, as Carolina Playmakers morphed into PlayMakers Repertory Company, with its status as a major L.O.R.T. regional theatre and its focus on professional production. Still, as we came up to this century milestone, a number of us here in the Department of Dramatic Art and at PlayMakers found ourselves reflecting on this visionary founder of ours and his mission to create drama that mirrored and served the lives of regular people—the ‘folk’.”

Proceeds will support UNC undergraduate playwriting.

Available in Paperback & EBook

TITLE: Carolina Folk Plays 2020

AUTHORS: Cole Kordus, Emily Jane MacKillop, Sorcha de Faoite, and Sam Bible-Sullivan.

EDITOR: Mark Perry

PRINT FORMAT: Trade Paperback, 5½ X 8½, 152 pages. $12.00

EBOOK: Amazon/Kindle, $6.00

ISBN: 978-0-9834701-9-9

LOC/PCN: 2020941395

PUBLICATION: August 2020 by Drama Circle

With “A Better Life,” Cole Kordus dramatizes a story that has lived in his family for generations—the coming of one of his ancestors to the United States from Poland. He sets this genuine, heartfelt piece in a 19th Century Polish village in the hour just before the rushed departure of Emilia Kuzminska. Cole took pains to make the play true to the place, character and mood of his ancestors’ experience.

“The Legend of Peter Dromgoole” is the culminating creative response to a years-long investigation (and minor obsession) by writer Emily Jane MacKillop. The folklore around this would-be-martyr-to-love is a perennial source of intrigue and mystery on our campus. This draft represents Emily Jane’s valiant struggle to fend off cliched forms and to find a set-up of the play that arose authentically from her perspective on the confounding and contradictory historical record.

Sorcha de Faoite is a student at National University of Ireland, Galway and was the latest in a considerable line of Irish foreign exchange students to grace my playwriting classes. It was at a quintessential UNC student event where the memories associated with the play “Kiss Fell” were triggered. She was struck with an urgency to explore her involvement in youth basketball—both the camaraderie and the isolation so keenly felt by a young, developing person. To us in the class, the dialogue sparkled with its local expression and charm.

“Ain’t That Just The Way” is a refreshing, funny and topical dip into the philosophies of a group of young men in the mountains of North Carolina. Sam Bible-Sullivan explores his generation’s dreams and realities, as these friends sit in nature, living out a ritual they have developed themselves, discussing the possibilities and best approaches to an uncertain future. As with “Kiss Fell,” we hear a particular dialect here that is partly about place and partly about time—namely, native Asheville millennials in 2020.