By Saiham Sharif
sharifsa@grinnell.edu
On Sunday Feb. 12 at 6 p.m., Caitlin Beckwith-Ferguson ’14 discussed her experiences with theatre and presented a staged reading of her one-woman play “I’m a Slut, Sababa.” The discussion, which was facilitated by Professor Craig Quintero, theatre and dance, enabled students to learn from Ferguson’s experiences. Ferguson majored in English while taking some theatre courses at Grinnell, a testament to the value of a liberal arts education.
After graduation, she completed a teaching fellowship in Israel, started working as the literary manager at Mosaic Theatre Company of D.C and eventually moved on to producing her own play. As a playwrite, she said that she experiences many struggles common among young artists: putting yourself out there, trying to “make it” in a hard-to-break-through field and using resources ingeniously.
“I actually staffed a Birthright trip — that’s how I got my flight over,” she said.
For her play, Ferguson interviewed twenty Israeli women, distilling their experiences into five central characters, each of whom dispel stereotypes about Israeli women. She included various perspectives, exploring topics like rape and sexual exploitation.
When asked about the perspectives she included in her play, Ferguson said, “I don’t want to have one Muslim character that ends up being stereotypical. There are also so many different types of Jews in the play that I think I could just do a show about Jewish identity.”
During the staged reading, ,Beckwith-Ferguson impressively used her limited environment to convey the essence of her characters by skillfully changing her voice to fit the accent of the characters, using hand gestures to convey personality and using body position to express ethos. She expressed frustration at the artistic process, but pushed through.
“I think I edited it over two years. It’s something that I want to share with people and that motivated me to keep working on it,” she said.
Connecting with people was a key component to the play’s promotion.
“We had a huge Facebook event. We all invited everyone we knew. I think the night coming up to it we posted Facebook statuses of our favorite line. I also knew someone that ran this newsletter that a lot of people read in Tel Aviv and I asked if he could put [the play] in the newsletter. I didn’t know if he was going to, but he did.”
Ferguson originally only expected 50 people to show up at the 150 maximum capacity venue on release night. However, she was surprised at the turnout. “There ended being a lot of people standing. It was definitely a fire hazard,” she said.
