Sam Kalista ’17ย wants to hear you laugh โ especially if you’reย in the audience when his 10-minute play, Kenwood, is performed at the 2017 Piccolo Spoleto Festival.
As the winner of the Todd McNerney Student Playwriting Award, Kalista will be one of 10 student writers to have a 10-minute play performedย by College of Charleston students inย Under the Lightsย atย 8 p.m. May 26, May 29-31, June 1 and June 3 at the Chapel Theatre. It is part ofย theย Stelle di Domaniย series,ย featuringย students, alumni and faculty fromย the College of Charleston’sย Department of Theatre and Dance.
“I am excited to see how my vision is interpreted on stage โ and to know how the audience reacts,” says Kalista, a recentย graduate of the College of Charleston’s four-yearย REACH Program for students with mild intellectual and/or developmental disabilities.ย “It will be good for me as writer to get that feedback.ย I would like to hear a good laugh from the audience.”
Although Kalista first became interested in theater as a high school student in Radnor, Pennsylvania, Kenwood is his first attempt at writing a play.
“I took a writing course my junior year, and I learned how to arrange the words to tell aย story,” he says. “But Iย took playwriting last semester because it involves more dialogue, and I thought if I could make the dialogue flow and then add in the action, it would be a good way to tell a story.”
It certainly seemed to work.
“This year there were slightly fewer than a dozen plays submitted for the Todd McNerney Award,” says CofC theatre professorย Todd McNerney, explaining that the awardย was established in 2007 by an anonymous donor to recognize the talent of student playwrights. “Sam’s play was selected the winner because it is terrific, well constructed and very funny. It is a broad comedy similar to Monty Python or to Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder.”
And that’s exactly what Kalista was after.
โWhen I started writing, I looked at my peers and what they were writing, and there was a lot of drama, a lot of suspense and mystery โ very serious subjects. And I thought, ‘I donโt want to be that serious. Why not do a comedy?” he says. “It’s good to have a little escape.ย Everybody needs that every now and then. So I wanted to lighten the mood a little.ย I wanted to crack a good joke and get a good chuckle.”
For Kalista, the audience’s reaction is almost as important as the actors’ performance of his work.
“I think theater is a form of expression โ not just of the writer or the director or the performers, but of the audience, too,” he says. “I also want to know what people think because this is a starting point for me.”
This summer, Kalista is moving to Atlanta to pursue his interests in writing and inย acting.
“I want to gain experience and expand my writing style and myself as an artist,” he says, noting that he is hoping to apply the skills he’s learned at the College to film and television. “I alsoย believe that being in that atmosphere will give me an opportunity to network with all kinds of different people โ not just in the theater industry, but otherย areas that I don’t even know about yet, but that I might want to explore in the future.”
And, while Kalista is excited about the future and what it might bring, for now he’s just looking forward to watching his play performed on stage โ and, of course, to hearing you laugh.