2025 Spring Studio Productions

The Smith College Department of Theatre presents an evening of student directed one-act plays on May 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m. in Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre in Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts. The 2025 Spring Studio Productions include Fourteen Hundred Thousand by Sam Shepard, directed by Chip Harty ’26 and Crave by Sarah Kane, directed by Max Lerin ’25. Tickets are free at smitharts.ludus.com.

Sam Shepard’s Fourteen Hundred Thousand was performed as a teleplay by National Educational Television and premiered on stage at the Firehouse Theatre in 1966. Sam Shepard (1943–2017) ranks as one of America’s most celebrated dramatists. He wrote nearly 50 plays that are performed around the world. By 1980, he was the most produced playwright in America after Tennessee Williams. Shepard’s work combines wild humor, grotesque satire, myth, and a sparse, haunting language to present a subversive view of American life. He also achieved fame as an actor, writer, and director in the films.

Fourteen Hundred Thousand takes place in an urban apartment where characters work on constructing a monstrous bookshelf, with fourteen hundred thousand books waiting outside ready to be walked up the apartment’s eight flights of stairs. The absurdist play is one of Shepard’s “distinctly American” and “genuinely original” works (The Village Voice.) Director Chip Harty was excited to find a play “that both lived in a very real, tangible world with actors, while simultaneously indulging in absurdity.” She adds that the play warns against complacency, “This resonates deeply with me as I think about the current political environment. While perhaps not a part of Shepard’s original vision, it has been shaping mine as I direct this in 2025.”

Crave by Sarah Kane is set in an unnamed city from which voices and images spring. The play premiered at the Traverse Theatre in the 1998 Edinburgh Festival. Time Out described the show as “a hugely unnerving theatrical experience, shot through with the language of the Bible and a genuinely poetic richness.” The New York Times called the work “a dramatic poem in the late-Beckett style, sometimes a chamber quartet for lost voices.”

Writer Sarah Kane (1971–1999) is widely recognized as one of the most radical and influential writers of the last twenty-five years, having written five plays and one short film before her early death at the age of 28. Kane’s work has been described as a “Theatre of Extremes.” She published Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon in 1998; Kane used a pseudonym to avoid the distraction of her reputation for graphic staged violence from her previous works. Director Max Lerin anticipates that audiences may not be able to logically explain what they just experienced, but hopes that Crave “hits home in the body and the heart in a way that may be difficult to articulate.”

Audiences should note that both shows contain potentially disturbing language. Crave has sexual content and mature language. Full details are available by contacting boxoffice@smith.edu. Tickets are free, reservations are encouraged at smitharts.ludus.com.