The Carleton Players, Carleton’s leading student theater group, will present “Split Seconds,” a new play by Michael Elyanow about the 2008 election in California and the battle over gay rights, at 7:30 nightly on Oct. 25, 26 and 27, along with a 2 p.m. matinee performance on Oct. 28. Performances take place in the Weitz Center for Creativity Theater. The event is free but reservations are recommended; tickets can be reserved at https://carleton.tixato.com/buy/.
“Split Seconds,” commissioned for the Players and directed by Ruth Weiner, the Carleton College Class of 1944 Professor of Theater and the Liberal Arts, is set at Stanford University on the eve of the first Obama victory and chronicles the debate over Proposition 8, a proposal eventually passed by the state’s voters. The measure added a new provision, Section 7.5 of the Declaration of Rights, to the state constitution, which provides that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." As the U.S. teeters on the brink of change, a group of overachieving college seniors struggle with big decisions that will, in a split second, change their lives forever...and, for one particular student, possibly end it. Carleton’s theater department commissioned “Split Seconds” because of its relevance to the current election season, and the Minnesota Marriage Amendment that is on the ballot.
Elyanow, who writes for film and television as well as the theater, is currently teaching a screenwriting course in Carleton’s cinema and media studies department. Elyanow has also taught at Northwestern University and Columbia College in Illinois and Hampshire and Emerson Colleges in Massachusetts. Last year, Elyanow led a program for aspiring playwrights at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre, and he spent three years as the lead artist for the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut.
Actors in Carleton Players productions are chosen through auditions open to the entire student body. The cast of “Split Seconds” includes: first-year student Grace Black (Jacksonville, Fla.); sophomores Berett Wilber (Sitka, Alaska), Andrew Harvey (Seattle), and Josh Davids (Seattle); and seniors Lauren Alexander (Lincoln, Mass.) and Peter Bumcrot (New York).
For more information about this event, including disability accommodations, contact the Carleton College Department of Theater and Dance at (507) 222-4531. The Weitz Center for Creativity is located at 320 North Third Street in Northfield.
