Daily Texan Feature: UT's Undergraduate Production of 'Some Girls' by Neil Labute, November 14 - 18

 
'Some Girl(s)' play to educate students about the world of acting

By Jasmin Carina Castanon November 14, 2012

(photo: Chelsea Purghan for the Daily Texan)

Jeremy Lee Cudd, a theatre and dance lecturer, claims to have been a bad actor at the beginning of his career. But he is now using the undergraduate acting project production of “Some Girl(s)” to teach undergraduate students how to avoid his mistakes.
“Some Girl(s)” tells the story of recently engaged Guy, who decides to travel the country to meet with his former girlfriends in an attempt to make amends before he begins his new life. While Hollywood romantic-comedies shy away from the messy aspects of love, “Some Girl(s)” tackles it head-on.

Cudd received his bachelor’s degree from Georgia State University in English literature with a minor in theatre. Cudd played drums/percussion for several musical theater productions, which is how he became interested in acting.

“There was something about the environment and the actors, their sort of weirdness,” Cudd said. “I really fell in love with it.”

Cudd felt like he hit a ceiling in his development as an actor, which is when he decided to pursue his master’s degree in acting at Penn State. Cudd said that he truly began to understand the basic elements of theater through graduate school.

“I didn’t know I wanted to be an actor until my last year of grad school,” Cudd said. “I started to branch out after that.”

Through “Some Girl(s),” Cudd aims to create a fundamental experience for his actors to grow and discover their own acting process.

Read more at the Daily Texan . . .  

Read more about Some Girls at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . 

Daily Texan: Undergrads Prepare Piece on Body Image for Cohen New Arts Festival

Reimagining body image, beauty through art

By Jasmin Carina Castanon

November 6 , 2012

Through the Cohen New Works Festival, presented by the UT University Co-op, students are given the opportunity to use theater as an agent for social change. Theatre studies junior Sarah Marcum and theatre and dance junior Paige Brown are taking advantage of this opportunity by collaborating on a project that draws attention to modern-day beauty ideals and their various effects on women.

(Photo: Chelsea Purghan for the Daily Texan)

Students have the opportunity to submit their own original pieces for consideration to be showcased during the weeklong festival that happens every other spring. The committee accepts all types of “new work,” whether it is theater, dance, music, film, design or visual art. The festival’s committee-at-large, which consists of about 40 undergraduate and graduate students, is currently in the process of selecting the works that will be showcased in the festival.

“It is a process that incorporates a large number of voices to help create as diverse a festival as humanly possible,” PR/Marketing chair Isaac Gomez said.

Marcum and Brown submitted an original piece about how Western culture’s modern ideal of beauty affects the day-to-day lives of women in the United States.

Marcum said the piece was influenced by the people in her life battling with the struggles of body image and beauty.

“Sarah approached me one day about wanting to create a piece on beauty and appearance that really talked about the very real social and political ramifications of having this one idea of beauty and how it plays itself out on different types of women,” Brown said.

Read more at the Daily Texan on-line . . . .