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MCC Daily Tribune

The Sixth Act's 2024-2025 Calendar, including Seayoung Yim's Korean-American Award-Winning Fable-Play

Please see below for The Sixth Act's 2024-2025 co-curricular, interdisciplinary events. Of special note is playwright Seayoung Yim's April 3-4 visit to MCC. Here's the Yale UP description of her play Jar of Fat:
An absurdist comedy and fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, exploring family, religion, identity, desire, and beauty in Korean American culture. In a fantastical fairy-tale world, two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave. Will the sisters’ close bond survive under the pressure of their community and fretful parents, who will spare no effort to make them tinier? Jar of Fat, the fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, is a phantasmagorical, absurdist Korean American tale about the allure and danger entangled within the quest for beauty and thinness. Both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply troubling, Seayoung Yim’s play burns through the accumulated rage that anti-fat bias produces to reclaim what it steals from us every day: grace, space, possibility, and breath.

Please email Maria Brandt at mbrandt@monroecc.edu with any questions or for a copy of Jar of Fat (while supplies last). All are welcome!

Visit the Sixth Act website. Formed in 2004, The Sixth Act provides co-curricular support for the study of drama across disciplines at MCC. To this end, The Sixth Act (1) develops co-curricular events and materials for MCC faculty and students, especially those who might teach or study plays or playwriting, and (2) provides enrichment opportunities to encourage all MCC faculty, students, and staff to see and talk about plays produced at MCC and in the Rochester area. The Sixth Act seeks as its leaders faculty, staff, and students drawn from a variety of academic disciplines and departments. The Sixth Act is supported by MCC’s Creative Arts Committee and School of Humanities and Social Sciences. For more information contact Maria Brandt (mbrandt@monroecc.edu).

Bake-Off/24-Hour Play:

  • Saturday, September 28, 7 PM
  • Forum, R. Thomas Flynn Campus Center
  • Free and Open to the Public

 MCC students will meet in The Forum at 7 PM on Friday, September 27, to begin the process of creating a series of short plays from nothing. 24 hours later, those plays will be ready for an audience. Come laugh with us, cry with us, and help us celebrate the magic of co-curricular, interdisciplinary collaboration at its most immediate.

Visiting Playwright, Seayoung Yim:

  • Thursday, April 3, 2025, 7 p.m., Black Box Theater, Reading and Conversation
  • Friday, April 4, 2025, 10 a.m., Black Box Theater, Interdisciplinary Theatre Workshop
  • Friday, April 4, 2025, 12 p.m., room 8-200, Playwriting Workshop

All Events are Free and Open to the Public.

Seayoung Yim is a playwright and educator from Seattle. Her play, Jar of Fat, published by Yale University Press, was the 2022 winner of the Yale Drama Series Prize. Honors include: Woolly Mammoth X Black List Playwriting Commission, Powers Playwriting Fellowship - Old Globe, 2023 Kilroys Web, Hedgebrook residency, Sewanee Writers’ Conference fellowship, Stephen Sondheim Graduate fellowship, finalist - 2024 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, second place - Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award (KCACTF). Her work has been supported by Ma-Yi Writer’s Lab, Clubbed Thumb, Annex Theater, Cafe Nordo, and others. MFA: Brown University. Visit her website (www.seayoungyim.com).

Eighteenth Annual Sixth Act Student Playwriting Competition:

  • Thursday, May 8, 7 PM, Black Box Theater
  • Free and Open to the Public

This competition encourages MCC students to write plays for an audience, to provide MCC students a competitive venue for their scripts, to offer winning playwrights the opportunity to see their scripts performed as staged readings with an eye towards future play development, and to offer VaPA students the opportunity to participate in the new-play-development process. Three winning playwrights receive cash prizes. One winning playwright also will have their play submitted to a nationwide competition. Scripts will be accepted for consideration beginning in September.

2024-2025 Special Projects:

The Sixth Act will develop curriculum-support materials and events for VaPA’s 2024-2025 season and for theatre productions in the Rochester community in an effort to encourage faculty across MCC to teach these plays in their individual courses and to enrich this process for all involved.

The Sixth Act also will continue to develop Drama on Demand, now as a Video Library. This popular program now features web-based, filmed versions of VaPA students performing scenes from published plays so these scenes can be used as co-curricular tools across campus.

Finally, The Sixth Act will pilot a special, credit-bearing Honors sequence culminating in student-driven presentations showcased each year during MCC’s Scholars’ Day.

Maria Brandt
The Sixth Act
08/28/2024