This past weekend in the Hill Theater, the Kenyon College Dance, Drama, and Cinema Club presented a staged reading of Marienville #1, a play written by Sam Phillips ’26 for his Drama senior capstone project. Directed by Ethan Greenzang ’27, the reading featured three actors and Amanda Kuo ’26 reading stage directions. Phillips wrote a compelling theatrical piece with clear characters and a fascinating central conflict, though I wish there had been more time dedicated to the ethical dilemma at the center of the show.

Marienville #1 tells the story of Micah (Poppy Meyer ’26), an angsty 20-something-year-old woman, who returns to her early childhood home to discover her mother Terry, a famous photographer, has died. Micah has been estranged from both her mother and her maternal grandmother, the exacting Frances (Beatrice Bunnell ’29), who raised Micah for most of her childhood. Over the course of the play, she must reconnect with Frances to deal with Terry’s death and the provenance of her most famous work, a series of controversial photographs called Marienville, which she took when Micah was five. The Marienville photos contain images of Terry and Micah living in poverty in a neglectful and unsafe home, and their legacy has followed Micah her entire life. To complicate matters, Micah realizes Terry has given the original negatives of Marienville to a troubled teenager in the neighborhood, Amber (Erin Fallon ’29), who has been studying them to work on her art school application. Micah agrees to help Amber finish her photography portfolio by helping her recreate Marienville #1, the first photograph in the Marienville set, for her application, in exchange for having the negatives returned to her. Micah hopes to prevent Frances from selling the negatives, thereby dragging Micah’s difficult childhood back into public view.

After the reading, Phillips shared that he felt his play was about “art and its relationship to memory.” He explained that he was inspired to write it because of his interest in photography, which both depicts the world exactly as it is and is a subjective medium that shows only a single perspective. The photographs discussed in the play depict a childhood Micah does not recall, yet this false image has replaced her own recollections of a happy time with her mother.

The play successfully engaged with themes of motherhood and intergenerational resentment, but I was surprised by Phillips’ description of his show because I found that the play’s text lacked a perspective on art’s objectivity. The script emphasized that the Marienville photographs carried a lot of baggage for Micah and Frances, and that both found themselves exploited within the photography. Yet Micah seemed to take the artistic merit of the photos at face value, even when the play raised the issues of consent in art and where the lines between personal suffering and public display lay. As Micah and Amber, Terry’s protege, grew closer, Amber expressed great respect for Terry as a person and as an artist. While Micah’s frustration with celebrating her mother as a person was very well expressed, her opinions on photography as an art form and on the artist’s duties toward who and what they depict felt underexplored. The central questions about the value of the Marienville photographs and, more broadly, what makes good and true art were not answered by the play. 

Phillips very successfully navigated the complex relationships among these three women. He created three distinct characters with great voice and relatable, engaging qualities in a show with a very compelling premise and a clear understanding of its own dramatic potency. However, I felt some opportunities were lost in the very engaging premise, and some of the juiciest, most tension-filled interactions were not fulfilled in this draft of Marienville #1.