New playwrights festival shines spotlight on emerging FGCU talent
5 – minute read
The Emerging Playwrights Festival, to be held Nov. 22-23 at Florida Gulf Coast University, will offer two rising young playwrights a rare opportunity to have their work read before a live audience.
“It’s vital,” says Barry Cavin, theatre professor in the Bower School of Music & the Arts and a driving force behind the new festival. “When we write plays by ourselves, we can read the work over and over in our heads, but it’s only when we’re sitting in the audience, hearing our words out of the mouths of actors and feeling the response of the people around us, that we know whether our ideas are being transmitted clearly.”
Play readings are common in the stage world. “It’s an industry standard exercise,” Cavin says. Because the script is read by actors but not staged with props, lighting or a set, the focus is purely on the dialogue. “It’s all about the words.”
The Emerging Playwrights Festival will feature works by two exceptional young playwrights: FGCU senior Robin O’Connell, an English major with theatre and creative writing minors; and Dane Futrell, a 2021 graduate with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a theatre minor. He is currently pursuing an MFA in dramatic writing at Arizona State University.
The festival takes place Nov. 22 and 23 at 7:30 p.m. in the TheatreLab in the Arts Complex. The event is free and open to the public.
O’Connell’s play, “Waterlogged,” draws inspiration from Irish selkie mythology. “A lot of my work comes from folklore and fairytales,” O’Connell says. “Those stories cut to the core of us and speak to something intrinsic in human nature.”
According to these myths, selkies — creatures that resemble seals in the water — can shed their skin on land and become human. If someone captures a selkie’s skin, they become bound by marriage to their captor. The selkie can only return to the water if they regain their skin.
O’Connell studied selkie mythology while spending a summer in Ireland through an FGCU study abroad program. They read over a hundred variations of the folklore before undertaking their own version. “The lens I’d always heard the story told through was from the captor’s point of view,” O’Connell says. “But it feels more sincere and honest to me to tell it from the selkie’s perspective.”
The Emerging Playwrights Festival will mark the first time “Waterlogged” is read in front of an audience — and the first time O’Connell will hear their words on stage.
“I get to experience my work in a new way,” they say. “It’s a really informative process, and I’m looking forward to gauging the audience’s reaction. One of the beautiful things about theater is that it brings people together. Playwriting is a very collaborative medium. We have to work with actors, directors, lighting and sound. Being a playwright inherently requires trust. We’re taking something we wrote and saying, ‘This is not just mine. It’s ours. We’re on this journey together.’ With a reading like the Emerging Playwrights Festival, the audience will be on the journey with us.”
Futrell also understands this process well. He began acting when he was 10 years old and continued performing for years before landing in Cavin’s playwriting class. That’s where he realized that the journal he’d been keeping for years was actually filled with dialogue. “That’s when I had an epiphany that playwriting was something I wanted to pursue,” Futrell says. His first full-length play was directed by Cavin and staged by Ghostbird Theatre Company in 2022.
Futrell’s play “Soul Magnet Beneath the Limestone” placed in the 2024 National Student Playwriting competition at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. The play was originally inspired by his time as a bartender in a speakeasy in downtown Fort Myers, and bringing it to FGCU and the Emerging Playwrights Festival is a kind of a homecoming for him. “It feels like I’m bringing the work full circle to come back to Florida and see it one more time,” Futrell says.
He credits his ongoing mentorship with Cavin as a prime motivating factor in his path as a playwright. “My connection with Barry runs deep,” he says. “I was mainly intrigued with acting for a long time — I wasn’t even a theatre major. But Barry really understood that connection and how I wanted to explore philosophy through my playwriting.”
Cavin believes Futrell and O’Connell share a dedicated passion for their work. “These two students are amazing young people,” he says. “They both will have many opportunities in whatever they choose.”