Published: Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008 / Updated: Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008 12:26 PM
Rehearsals, Rehearsals!
Fort Mill dynamo writes, directs, and weds
Last summer at Winthrop University, playwright-actor-director Jason Cripps had two new scripts performed at Rock Hill Community Theatre's Down Home Play Festival - and he directed a third among the six finalists.
| For this year's festival, performed Thursday through Saturday evenings this week at 8 p.m., with a 3 p.m. matinee on Sunday, only one Cripps opus made the cut, "Salvo," and the Fort Mill writer will direct his own piece. Still, you can hardly say that Cripps is tapering off. In the midst of choosing his actors at auditions, directing his cast at rehearsals, and attending the 2008 festival, Cripps broke away to attend to some personal business: his wedding and his honeymoon! | |
| When we spoke to him on Aug. 1, Cripps was between rehearsals - at the Rock Hill theater and the Tega Cay church, Lakeshore Christian Fellowship, where he was married the following evening. | |
| "It was funny," he admitted. "At first, my fiancée wasn't too crazy about the idea - having rehearsals before the wedding, then the honeymoon, and come right back and have to direct. But she loves me, so we worked it out. I get to do both." | |
| At age 39, Cripps is just now beginning to gather steam in the theatre world. He wrote, directed, and acted in high school, but then he stopped for awhile, 16-18 years by his estimate. He went back to Winthrop to polish his acting skills, caught the writing bug again, and drifted into directing. | |
| Through Winthrop mentor Russell Luke, Cripps hooked up with Down Home as a director in 2007, the first time that the University hosted the festival. Cripps threw the event into some mild confusion when it came to light that he had authored two of the six scripts. Cripps' bride-to-be, Maris, attended the event. | |
| "We had just met that May," Jason recalls. "She loves theater, but she's more into dance. She has said that she'd like to be an actress and do some acting at some point, so that would be nice. She was a ballet dancer for a long time and would love to teach dance in some way." | |
| Hosted by Winthrop University Department of Theatre and Dance at Johnson Hall, the 2008 Down Home Festival will showcase four playwrights from the Metrolina area. | It wasn't a single "aha!" moment that prompted Cripps to write "Salvo," which traps an Iraq War vet in a stalled elevator with an ex-Iraqi citizen of Arab descent. The playwright recalls hearing multiple accounts about the hardships experienced by US Soldiers - subpar equipment over there in the battlezones of Baghdad, inadequate benefits when they return home from duty. |
| The clincher came by way of radio. | |
| "I listened to NPR, 'This American Life,'" Cripps recalls, "and there was a story on there about a guy who was a soldier. He went to a class in a college, and it was all Iraqis in the class of Arab descent. And he made the decision, because he had fear and hatred for these people - he made a decision to be part of the class. And he ended up doing volunteer work for them. It was just an amazing story." | |
| Ticket prices are $12 for adults and $10 for students and seniors on Friday and Saturday nights. Prices go down, $10 for adults and $8 for students and seniors, on Thursday night and for the Sunday matinee. Anyone with a Winthrop University ID will be admitted to any show for $5. |
McClatchy Interactive is pleased to be able to offer its users the opportunity to make comments and hold conversations online. However, the interactive nature of the internet makes it impracticable for our staff to monitor each and every posting.
Since MIReference.com does not control user submitted statements, we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted on our website. In addition, we remind anyone interested in making an online comment that responsibility for statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not McClatchy Interactive.
If you find a comment offensive, clicking on exclamation icon will flag the comment for review by the administrators, we are counting on the good judgment of all our readers to help us.