‘Umbra’ brings contemporary student-written theater to community

BY ELLE MULLER

The Dartmouth Senior Staff

This article was originally published on Feb. 27, 2023.

On Sunday, Feb. 19, Dartmouth and Upper Valley community members fled into Sawtooth Bar and Kitchen to see “Umbra,” the student-written one-act festival. Dartmouth’s Displaced Theater Company selected four contemporary one-acts to be performed in its frst annual one-act festival.

“Umbra” included four one-acts titled “Carrot Cake” — written by Jordan Paf ’23 and directed by Eva Hymes ’25, “Quantum Cafe” — written by Ore James ’25 and directed by Maggie MacDonald ’23, “Infatable Heart” — written and directed by Kamila Boga ’25 and “Heliotrope” — written by Kabir Mehra ’26 and directed by Eda Naz Gokdemir ’25.

Displaced Theater Company is an interview-based student-led theater company that was revived spring 2022 by Boga and Hymes, as well as Gwendolyn Roland ’25 and Annabel Everett ’25. Boga said that Displaced Theater’s refounding was rooted in a desire for contemporary theater spaces on campus.

“We felt that what was lacking [in the theater department] was contemporary theater,” Boga said. “We felt that the plays chosen by the theater department, while contemporary, weren’t especially relevant to the culture of Dartmouth and the things that we found inspiring and exciting and terrifying about performing.”

For its winter one-act festival “Umbra,”

Hymes emphasized Displaced Theater’s goal was to maximize opportunities for Dartmouth students by selecting their original shows — something Displaced Theater had never done before.

Boga said the group wanted to create more opportunities for playwrights on campus — explaining that the original idea of a student-written one-act festival began in the spring of 2022.

“I feel like there’s not enough opportunities for playwrights on campus, in general,” Boga said. “We have the Frost Dodd competition, but that’s only once a year…I just felt like we were missing something on campus… I thought it would be good to do something yearly, just as something diferent.”

On Jan. 6, Displaced Theater closed its student submissions for “Umbra.”

With no theme, the only guideline for submissions was a page limit of 20 pages. MacDonald said the decision to have no theme for the festival was intentional.

“We didn’t really want to limit ourselves to genre... [we] ended up choosing the ones that spoke to us the most...I feel like they end up kind of talking well with one another,” MacDonald said.

Although there was no theme, Hymes emphasized that Displaced Theater wanted to focus on issues that do not normally surface in college sponsored shows. The one-act plays chosen for “Umbra” dealt with concepts of abuse and alcoholism.

According to Boga and MacDonald, the one-act plays had about two weeks of rehearsals after they were selected; each one-act had a diferent rehearsal