On April 26 and 27, the Arellano Theater came alive with more than the wafting smells of vegan sesame chicken and taco meat from the neighboring Levering Kitchen. It was the site for the Witness Theater’s 2025 Spring Showcase: a performance of student-written, student-run plays rejuvenating a campus of otherwise finals-weary Blue Jays.
The first play of the Showcase — Producer’s Note, written by Kate Ketelhohn and directed by Yona Levine — sets a deliciously meta, comically self-aware and soberingly self-deprecating tone for the production to follow. It features Jewels Seeger playing Madisn’t Ep-not, who chronicles the struggles Hopkins has had with getting the Spring Showcase — a supposedly easy production — off its feet. In an email interview with The News-Letter, Executive Producer and muse Madison Epner delivered a candid explanation of the realities this first play tackles.
“The truth behind the matter is that Witness Theater faces unexpected roadblocks and red tape each showcase, and we persevere nonetheless!” Epner wrote. “Some of our roadblocks are typical to any theater production, no matter the scale, and some of them are unique to Hopkins because of our lack of dedicated theater spaces and the arts not being an institutional priority.”
In a maneuver that distinguishes Producer’s Note as a play and not pure reality, Ep-not constructs conspiracies about the ghost of Ira Remsen haunting the arts at Hopkins, citing past theater-related incidents and encumbrances as evidence. Seeger magnificently captured the exasperation of an arts student at Hopkins from the moment she ran up and down the stairs of the theater, madly signaling to the booth to cue the lights.
With the doppelgänger of the first play finished, the Showcase shifts to Sallynade, written by Celina Stodder and directed by Claire Nalda. This play tells the story of two elementary schoolers who at first seem to want different things from one another — Sally (Gloria Li) to get into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Carl (Jason Lafita) to impress Sally — but truly want the same thing: to be with one another. This truth unravels throughout their scheme to earn the most sales for an elementary school business-club competition by cutting corners and selling store-bought lemonade.
An endearing portrait of childhood crushes and delusions of grandeur, Sallynade wields hilarious hyperbole and smooth switches from one action to the next, which both engages and satisfies the audience. Li and Lafita played perfect foils for one another, with the former’s blind and perhaps cold-at-first ambition balancing the latter’s puppy-dog love and sincerity.
The next two plays — Sunset on the Rooftop, written by Qiushi (Chris) Tian and directed by Vanisha Kheterpal; and Strangers on a Train, written by Vaibhavi Udaysimha and directed by Yatzil Gutzman — included content warnings for discussions of suicide, depression and suicidal ideation. By the end of these two plays, I feel that they can be well-defined by the content warnings alone.
Sunset on the Rooftop portrays an argument between a couple. Although the play begins with the girlfriend Protagonist (Sarah Larson) taking too long to get ready to view a rooftop sunset, it spins into her boyfriend Partner (Benjamin Roberts) revealing the truth about his depression and implied suicide. Strangers on a Train is about an elderly depressed woman who mourns the loss of her baby years ago to a young stranger on the train, who turns out to be her dead son if he grew up.
While all actors involved did the best with the scripts they had — particularly Larson as Protagonist and Sara Pantoja as Becca, the elderly depressed woman — the plays themselves lacked substantial nuance and fell into the pitfalls of dark, twisty, woe-is-me, “edgy” stories. The descriptions of depression in Sunset on the Rooftop often seemed trite, and the reveal of the young man as the woman’s dead son grown up felt like the end of a Scooby Doo episode when the Mystery Gang unveils the bad guy.
That being said, there were certainly admirable and redeeming aspects in both of these plays as well. The ending of Sunset on the Rooftop began to achieve the nuance I wanted, and the dialogue was engaging and ever-changing, making it an intriguing game of cat and mouse — the dynamics of power always shifting. In Strangers on a Train, despite the perhaps cliche ending, the foreshadowing leading up to that was consistently subtle and competently scattered.
Each proceeding play seemed to meet the task of one-upping the one before it: In the end, between the final three plays of the Showcase, I can’t pick a favorite but rather enjoy each one for its own merits.
Coin Toss by Gemma Watson occupies a sparse area, both in terms of time and space. We witness government agent Gregory (Benjamin Roberts) as he unloads onto the pedestrian mother Margaret (McKenzie Christiansen) that something catastrophic is about to happen — only in two plane seats, only in the final moments of the ride. In the end, nothing happens (which, apparently, is precisely what ends up happening most of the time in these “doomsday” scenarios).
Roberts played a delightfully hateable character from the moment he awoke everyone in the audience with his dreadful snoring and subsequent fit of coughing. Christiansen, on the other hand, blessed the audience with a masterclass of emotions that rang true for what a mother helpless to save her family would feel — again, all framed within the confines of a plane stuck in air. While the actors held up their end of the bargain in bringing the script to life, the play speaks for itself as well. On paper alone, there are brilliant philosophical moments that are rife with content to ponder, which almost made me wish for an intermission just to think about some of the lines spoken.
Next was High Stakes written by Madison Epner and directed by Mariana Ferreira and Daphne Hartch. The audience watches Nadia (Mehuli Basu Roy) as she watches her ex-situationship/current best friend/still crush, who is breaking up with her boyfriend in a cemetery. Nadia is ambushed by her friend Coley (Layomi Omole), who has similarly unrequited feelings for the protagonist. While boasting a robust plot capable of standing on its own, I believe the true delight of this play is its unique sense of college — Hopkins in particular — ephemera: the ways different college majors behave (Psychology majors stalking their crushes, for example), the fleeting feelings for different people.
It seems as if the college/Hopkins vibe of High Stakes is no accident. In an email interview with The News-Letter, Epner reveals how her multilayered involvement with the Witness Theater enables her to write the perfect play for the Showcase.
“I know that having worked as both a producer and stage manager for so many Hopkins productions has helped me ground my playwriting,” Epner writes. “[W]orking with Witness for so long has helped me adjust my writing to match the strengths of the directors and actors who are involved.”
The final play of the Showcase was The Extra-Troublesome Intern written by Meenal Srivastava and directed by Miles Durham. Tom (Celina Stodder) is an eager-to-please frat pledge who is mistakenly abducted by the career-climbing alien Zornak (Lucy Burnham). As it turns out, Zornak was supposed to capture the humans’ chief, but Tom’s mandatory getup for the social made him appear exactly like the illustration with which Zornak was provided. In the end, after much fretting from both parties, Tom informs Zornak of a lookalike of the “humans’ chief,” or any old white man with a combover who wears a suit, that he can capture: Ronald J. Daniels.
Burnham and Stodder granted perhaps the most prodigious performances of the Showcase, displaying flawlessly mindful interaction rather than rote recitation. Many theatrical productions run the risk of there being an “invisible script,” so to speak: While the actors may not hold the paper in front of them, the audience can tell that they are interacting with the script rather than their peers on stage. Burnham and Stodder, however, perfectly replicated a realistic, organic interaction in the most inorganic and unrealistic of circumstances.
In an email to The News-Letter, Epner set the following bar for gauging the Showcase’s success: “If someone finds themself continuing to think about one of our shows or laughing at a line from one of the plays, that means we’ve succeeded.” By this standard — and many others — the Witness Theater’s 2025 Spring Showcase was certainly a home run.
