OUR BACK YARD FINE AND PERFORMING ARTS
From the study to the stage
Adjunct professor Susan Felder’s play stars a former student
M
ore than two years ago, Loyola adjunct professor Susan Felder gathered in a small Lake Shore Campus office with two students for a reading of her new play,
Apocalypse Godot. The play, set in war-era Vietnam, told the story of two imprisoned young American soldiers. Raw, quickly written, and at only around 25 pages, it had no clear future. That same play, renamed Wasteland, opened at
Chicago’s renowned TimeLine Theatre Company in Oc- tober 2012 and was hailed by the Tribune as “a superbly directed production…quite subtly written” and by Time Out Chicago as “a harrowing and heartbreaking work.” Felder and director William Brown aren’t the only
ones receiving rave reviews. The play’s star, Nate Burger (BA ’10), a Loyola alumnus and the same student who took part in the first reading of the play in Felder’s of- fice, has been praised as a “beautifully authentic” and “vulnerable” performer. Loyola’s theatre department approved the project
for a workshop production, but getting it off the ground proved to be difficult. “They couldn’t put it in the regular season,” Felder
says. “Things got a little crazy, and there weren’t any actors available. I went home with every intention of not doing it.” It was her students that kept the project alive. “They
just went commando on me. They said: ‘We’re doing this,’” Felder says. But that’s the lovely thing about Loyola students—they have a lot of ownership.” A student-produced workshop of the play (not
involving Burger) was performed last November in one of Loyola’s black-box studios. While not a full-fledged production, it piqued interest in the piece. Felder
Nate Burger (BA ‘10) plays an American soldier captured by the enemy in Vietnam who forms an unlikely alli- ance with a neighbor- ing American soldier in TimeLine Theatre’s world premiere of Wasteland, written by adjunct professor Susan Felder.
showed the script to friend and director William Brown, who encouraged TimeLine’s artistic director, PJ Powers, to take a look at it. Though TimeLine’s season was already mostly
planned, the company was so impressed by Burger’s reading of the play that they hastily added it to the season. Burger plays Joe, whom he describes as a “stand-in
modern liberal who is a closeted homosexual.” On the other side of the prison wall (hidden from the audience) is Riley, played by Steve Haggard, a Southern man whose conservative views clash with Joe’s. The two must come
20 LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO
COURTESY OF TIMELINE THEATRE
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