First Light 2025 featured five ten-minute plays and one one-act, all written and directed by students in the School of Theatre and Dance.

Opportunity is one of the greatest resources available to any artist, and a good artist knows always to be open to finding them. And if you can’t find one? Create your own! This concept was the inspiration for the creation of First Light, a new student works festival from Script Raiders and Red Theatre Company, which ran May 2 & 3.

It all started with the loss of Frontier Fest, the school-run student play festival that ran annually until last year. As theatre schools are always changing and evolving, this event was discontinued to make room for new ones, but it did leave a hole for students who wanted a chance to showcase their own work. “It was kind of a shame,” said Justin Gonzales. “It was great to have a place for student playwrights to show off their stuff, so that’s why we decided to put on our own. Not to replace something, but to fill the empty void and provide that opportunity again.” Both Red Theatre and Script Raiders envisioned an event that would be entirely student-run and decided that working together would be the best way to stage it successfully.

As president of Red Theatre Company, I had the pleasure of being part of the process from beginning to end and working extensively with both boards. The team consisted of Script Raiders President Gonzales and Vice President Ben Smith; and Red Theatre Social Chair Emma B. Leighton, Treasurer Naomi Taylor, and Secretary Emma Taylor. We had many ideas, but having never produced a play festival before, we found the input from our organization advisers, Jesse Jou and Dr. Chris Staley, to be invaluable.

First Light 2025 featured five ten-minute plays and one one-act, all written and directed by students in the School of Theatre and Dance. An open call audition was held, resulting in the casting of students from several programs across campus. Students were also given the opportunity to be abstractors, creating artistic responses to the shows, such as drawings, soundscapes and costume designs. These innovative designs were available for audience viewing outside of the performance space. One of the main points of the event was to show what students could achieve with very minimal departmental support, so each cast provided their own costumes and props and served as their own set crew.

As for the subject matter, the plays ranged in storyline from confronting death and purity culture to the fallout of an alien invasion. “We have a wide range of topics that we’re tackling here,” Smith explained. “We didn’t really have a theme in mind because we wanted to see what would come from what our students had already. So, there’s a lot of really juicy stories that are being told in this batch of plays, and a lot of them do a really good job of breaking the mold of what people expect of live theatre.”

Of course, the highlight of the festival was having the audience see the fruits of everyone’s labors come to life. “We have actors, directors, designers and playwrights all collaborating on this one project,” said Leighton. “That’s why it is so important to support new works in this capacity, because in this art form, if there is no collaboration, the art dies.”

For both organizations, future plans for First Light mainly include expanding the scope of the event by featuring more scripts and multiple performance times for each show. Our hope is to see collaboration with all of the theatre student groups to make this a more fully rounded event.