HOPE SMITH
managing editor
hope.smith393@my.tccd.edu

SE campus is hosting the Festival of New Plays this spring where four award-winning student-written plays were selected for production. Among them is “LOV3,” written by Emanuel Omweri and directed by Derek Salazar. 

Expected to show Feb. 22, 23, and 24 at 7:30 p.m., the festival performances will take place in the Black Box Theatre, ESEE 1316.

The play centers around a girl named Jenny, and child psychologist Dr. Bleu who works with her to decipher her meaning of love with an offsetting, comedic and offbeat tone as the play progresses and watchers learn Jenny is a robot, incapable of love.

Salazar said after reading the play, he knew he wanted to direct it because of its look into love.

“It explores these patterns of love and how we define our love and how outside forces help shape our idea of love,” Salazar said.

SE student Isara Al-Hilo who acts as Jenny said that because of how different the piece is from what she’s done before, she has been learning new things and explained her character’s perspective of love as it differs and Jenny’s journey to explain it.

“I guess for Jenny her perspective of love is very, very different from everybody else,” Al-Hilo said. “It’s very interesting to see how she tries to explain to Dr. Bleu what her meaning of love is, what she cares about,” Al-Hilo said.

Salazar explained that much of the theme of the play revolved around defining love. For Jenny, Salazar said she first defines love from the textbook definition.

“We all have our different definitions of love,” Salazar said. “We’re not always like, ‘it’s what’s in the dictionary, that’s what love means.’ but it’s like each one of us has our own little baggage. Our own little dip into what love is.”

For cast member and SE student Jadon Carrier who acted as Dr. Bleu, he said he was happy with the process and thought production was running well.

“I think it’s been going pretty smoothly,” Carrier said. “I think it’s going a lot better than we thought, especially our progress. We’ve only been off the books for three days, and we’re actually doing really well.”

Dr. Bleu, who Carrier said experienced a complicated upbringing, was an interesting character.

“His whole thing is giving people a chance,” Carrier said.

This production was the first that assistant stage manager Jace Givens was working with Salazar. Givens said that working with Al-Hilo and Carrier has been easy because of how quickly the two picked up their lines.

“It’s the first time I’ve worked with Derek as a director, and it’s been really interesting to see how he made the show change from how we started to now, and we aren’t even in tech yet and it looks pretty good,” Givens said.

Both Givens and Al-Hilo said they were excited for showings as Al-Hilo was ready for their hard work to be seen and Givens wanted to see the audience’s thoughts.

“I’m excited for the audience’s reactions, I wanna hear how people understand the show and how they see it because it’s a unique show – in my opinion,” Givens said.