Students, faculty and staff at Louisiana Tech are gearing up for this year’s Fall Theatre Festival, featuring eight individual works that will be performed Oct. 20-23.
This year’s theme was “Invisible Voices,” and Vanna Richardson, a senior communication major with theatre concentration, had her submission, “The Dating Pool Has Pee in it,” accepted to the festival.
“I really liked the idea that they wanted to showcase ‘invisible voices,’” Richardson said. “I like the idea of highlighting characters that aren’t often seen on stage or who don’t often have a large role in a play.”
Her play is about a woman dating in the current era of technology and swiping left and right and all the pitfalls and misunderstandings that come with that.
“A lot of the main character’s stories and experiences were taken from my own life or the lives of friends who are also dating,” she said. “I took those stories and threw in a dash of wish fulfillment and out came the script.”
Richardson said she was “over the moon” when she found out her ten-minute play had been chosen as one of the final eight.
“I had been really anxious about the script and when I received the email stating that my play had been chosen I most definitely did a happy dance,” she said.
Richardson is no stranger to theatre. She lived in New York from 2014-2017 stage managing indie and community theatre productions around the NYC area.
“When I originally moved to NYC, I just wanted to know if I could survive as a small fish in such a big pond,” she said. “Once I realized that I could survive and even thrive in the big pond, it made me realize that I didn’t love what I was doing — stage management — as much as I thought. So I went back to the drawing board and decided to switch my long-term career goals. It’s hard to live in NYC when you don’t have a firm plan and endgame in mind, so I returned to (Louisiana) to the safety net of family while I figured out what my next steps should be. Those steps just happened to include going back to finish my degree and that’s how I ended up here.”
Now, as Richardson finishes up her degree, she plans to encourage more voices to be heard.
“My ultimate goals are to start a theatre company and produce primarily newer works,” she said. “I think that more women and people of color need to be in charge of deciding which stories are getting told and how those stories are told.”
For more information about the Fall Play Festival, call the School of Theatre at 318-257-2711.
