Brandon Williams is ready to premiere a play he has been working on since his sophomore year at SIU.
“The Yard” will show at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday at the McLeod Theatre, said Williams, an SIUC alumnus from Peoria.
Williams said he had one act done when he graduated and finished the other two in the summer.
“I was sitting around at home and I’m like, ‘well, you know, I’m not doing anything else, so why not finish the play and put it on at SIU?,’” he said.
Williams said he held auditions in the first week of school and chose 15 performers out of the 60 students who tried out.
One of the performers he chose was Cortez Johnson, a junior from Chicago studying theater. Johnson said he has known Williams for years and helped him write the conclusion.
“With the cast there’s a lot of energy and a lot of potential,” Johnson said. “They came ready to work.”
Williams said the inspiration for mixing a cappella into the play stemmed from his experience with spoken-word poetry.
“Instead of being confined to a beat like rap is, spoken word is more … like performance poetry,” Williams said. “I called it an a cappella hip-hop musical because we’re rapping, but there are no beats to it. It’s more spoken word. It’s interactive.”
Another performer in the play, Lester Hill, a senior from Chicago studying journalism, said Williams made tapes of how he wanted the dialogue to be spoken.
“It was kind of easy to hear yourself while you do it,” Hill said.
Johnson said Williams has his own genre because the play’s dialogue is not rapping or singing.
“I call it poetic form because the literature is very rhythmic,” Johnson said.
Williams said the play goes from dialogue to a cappella, which is similar to musicals in how they transition from dialogue to singing. The performers trade off rhymes when they converse, which will be new to audience members but easy to follow, he said.
Williams said the play’s tagline, “College: mixing teenage adolescence with adult responsibility,” stemmed from a conversation with a friend.
“He was like, ‘Why do so much crazy things happen at college, like kids doing this stuff or drugs or whatever’,” Williams said.
Williams said the core of the play shows some elements of what all students’ experience, such as financial trouble, discrepancies with professors, parties, relationships and drug education.
Johnson said it was easy to connect to the play because he lives the college experience. He plays Steve Williams in the production and gives the backdrop of college life, he said.
“I show what goes on with finances, what goes on behind the chair of the professor in the classroom and also things students deal with, such issues as boyfriends and girlfriends and social orientation,” Johnson said.
Williams said he wants the play to relate to students and their experiences at college.
“I want them to take everything as exactly what they see … because what’s in there is educational information,” he said. “It’s ‘edutainment’ at its finest, education and entertainment.”
Tickets can be purchased at Kampus Kuts Barbershop, located at 825 S. Illinois Ave.
