Do you secretly enjoy awkward conversations, especially when you're just watching and not involved in them? Have you recently experienced the anxiety of a job interview gone horribly wrong? Maybe you have an interest in the responsibilities that people of the present bear in relation to people of the distant past. Maybe you're more concerned with avoiding the mistakes of a more immediate predecessor, the sorts of sad decisions (or lack thereof) that set the course of your life and echo in ways that may surprise you when they shouldn't.

Or maybe you just like a good show. Whether dead serious, happily insane or somewhere in between, chances are there's something for you in the New Play Festival.

From Thursday, April 30 to Saturday, May 2, the Department of Theater and Dance is presenting nine student-written, studentdirected one-acts as full sessions of the Undergraduate Research Symposium. All nine plays will be performed each night in Strider Theater, starting at 7:30 p.m. They are produced by department chair Lynne Conner's class TD361: the New Play Practicum, and each play stars students who are participating in the festival on top of normal academic obligations.

Directors and playwrights include both Beatrices from JanPlan's Much Ado About Nothing, seniors Ashlee Holm and Kayt Tommasino; Spring Awakening director Kat Brzozowski '09; Sean Senior '10, writer-director of Powder & Wig's Phedra; Colby Dance Theater stage manager Alex Desaulniers '11; mad Colby Improv genius Andy Bolduc '10 and a further smattering of students across class years with widely varying degrees of theater experience.

Eight of the nine plays are from another class taught by Conner, last semester's TD141: Beginning Playwriting. Each student wrote three plays linked by a theme; Brzozowski's was "coming home," while Tommasino examined motherchild relationships. Unusual habits dominated each play by Fritz Freudenberger '09, and in first-year Lucy Dotson's work, there was always "something missing." Characters run the gamut from grieving sisters, an ancient war goddess and a possibly crazy homeless man to divorced superheroes, a talk radio host and a definitely not-crazy prostitute named Bunny.

There's also a watermelon in there somewhere. That's--at the very least--just as random as it sounds, but to know how, you'll just have to see the show, won't you?