EDITOR’S NOTE: In today’s edition, Features Editor Lucinda Breeding reviews the drama Videotape in the following feature story about its writer and the play’s appearance at the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival.

Cody Lucas has never taken a class in playwriting.

The 21-year-old University of North Texas senior didn’t let that keep him from writing plays — mostly murky dramas — for the theater company he helped form, Sundown Collaborative Theatre.

When he learned that a family drama he wrote last year was selected for three performances at the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, Lucas said he reacted by “running around my apartment.”

DRC/Lucinda Breeding

Chris Taylor, front, and Cody Lucas have “workshopped” Lucas’ original drama Videotape for the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. The festival is a regional outlet for existing and emerging theater, music and dance companies to stage new work. A panel whittles about 200 submissions to 20 on the festival roster. Lucas, a 21-year-old University of North Texas senior, is a precocious writer leading a precocious company in the festival project.

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“I announced it at a rehearsal we were doing in December. I said: ‘Yeah. The play was accepted into the Out of the Loop festival, so we’ll be doing this again in two months,’” Lucas said. “I was ecstatic.”

The Out of the Loop Fringe Festival is one of the few of its kind in the region. The festival promotes new work in theater and dance for existing and emerging theater, dance and music companies. This year’s festival includes big-name participants such as New Yorker Mike Daisy and author and illusionist David Parr, who presents <ITAL> Mimi at the 44th Parallel.

“When we went to the opening-night party [Thursday], I was telling people: ‘I’m nervous!’ They’d ask why and I was like: ‘I feel so young,’” he said.

Lucas said he fielded questions about his age when he reached for a wine glass on a passing tray. He looks younger than his 21 years, and he and his Sundown peers will be among the youngest Out of the Loop participants.

The fledgling writer produced the play Videotape last fall. He’d been listening to a song of the same name by the British band Radiohead a lot, he said, and he started imagining what it would be like to watch someone record their last goodbye. Soon enough, a story about a pair of abandoned brothers was unfolding in his imagination.

“I started thinking about the house being a place of confinement, and the videotape and the environment being part of that,” Lucas said.

Fast-forward to the present: Lucas’ play is good. Really good.

It’s a story of two scared teenagers who are stunted by severe agoraphobia brought on by their absent father’s vague parting advice and years of homemade ritual. Confined to their filthy house and educated only by television shows, TV preachers, commercials and each other, the boys — innocent and immature — are shattered when one of their secrets upsets their comfortable belief system and reveals that everything they know might be based on lies and adult half-truths. The drama is a punch in the gut that happens both in slow motion and at lightning speed.

Lucas’ play is propelled by an economical dialogue and a plot with no fat. Whether or not they are orphans is a decision the audience will have to make — just as it’s up to the audience to determine whether the ending is hopeful or a condemnation.

Lucas said he drew a little bit from his family life — he’s a twin, older by 10 minutes, and the son of an Air Force man who was gone for a year at a time several times during his childhood.

Courtesy photo/Sundown Collaborative Theatre

Ben Darling (standing) and Cody Lucas worked with a fight choreographer to make their physical scenes look more realistic.

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Lucas also is a fan of actor, musician and playwright Sam Shepard (Black Hawk Down, Brothers). Shepard is a theater icon known for his dark, violent plays that explore both family dysfunction and masculinity.

“When my family saw the play back in December, they said: ‘Yeah, I understand where you came up with that. We did Christmas that way.’ They said they understood a lot of what I did in the play,” Lucas said. “They’ve seen other shows I’ve written and gotten upset about them.”

Submitting work to Out of the Loop had gotten Lucas nothing but rejection letters until 2009.

“I’ve auditioned at WaterTower Theatre before, and I submitted two plays last year for the festival. Sundown [Collaborative Theatre] submitted five plays in all. The festival is a big thing for new playwrights.”

Chris Taylor, the director and media designer of the play, is seven years Lucas’ senior, with a master’s degree in theater from Texas Woman’s University under his belt.

“It’s really hard to get someone to do a new play. It’s hard to see a new play, and it’s harder to get someone to do one. It’s like no one wants to do a new piece of theater by someone who isn’t already established,” Taylor said.

Sundown Collaborative Theatre is young, but the company has whipped out two seasons — two busy seasons — of theater. The collective was formed in 2007. They launched the company in March 2008 with Conversations About Love, an original work written by company members.

Lucas has rewritten Videotape roughly 100 times since the initial draft. At the festival, the company will perform a different ending than what’s in the submitted script. Taylor thinks the new ending is even better than what Lucas sent last year.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Taylor said, “I’m happy with the show we did in December. But even bringing in a fight choreographer to work on the fight scene that had been in the play already did a lot to build the intensity and specificity of the story.”

The company simplified the show for the festival. Members will haul bags of trash and at least 50 used pizza boxes to the WaterTower Theatre for their performance. The company won’t use the Stone Cottage Theatre lighting. The only light will come from the television and a few lamps. The set will be little more than a few boxes, a broken-down hide-a-bed and its mattress.

“We got a hide-a-bed from Craigslist for $40, and it broke in the second or third rehearsal,” Lucas said.

Taylor said the play made it easy for the company to adapt to surprises.

“We had to figure out a way around this broken couch,” he said. “We tried to fix it with speaker wire, and it broke. Zip ties broke. Fishing wire fixed it. And it didn’t matter, because things don’t have to look pretty.”

For Taylor, Sundown Collaborative is something of a godsend. As a stay-at-home dad, Taylor is studying for his teaching certificate and doing theater at night.

“What drew me to Sundown was this vibrant, vital energy,” Taylor said. “It was the work that got me interested. If I had a day job, and if it weren’t for Sundown, I’d be working all day and then driving two hours to do theater in Dallas. I’m really glad I don’t have to do that.”

Sundown will continue to produce theater in Denton, though finding suitable space is hard. The company isn’t sure what’s next for Videotape. The company could submit it to another festival.

“I do kind of feel that, in getting into the festival, I do have a product,” Lucas said. “When I submitted it, it didn’t have a title and it had a different ending, and I didn’t really feel like it was finished. But now, I feel like there is a product there.”

Taylor said the drama represents the direction in which theater needs to move if it’s to get a young, growing audience.

“I feel like, almost, to do theater that is vital and vibrant and is connected to what is now and what is going on now, you have to create it yourself,” he said.

“If you want to see theater that deals with what’s going on now, this is the kind of theater you have to do.”

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.

VIDEOTAPE

What: A drama by Cody Lucas and Sundown Collaborative Theatre that will be performed at the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival

When: 2 p.m. today, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and 5 p.m. March 14

Where: Stone Cottage Theatre, 15650 Addison Road in Addison

Details: Tickets cost $10 for adults. To make reservations, call the festival box office at 972-450-6232 or visit http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?organ_val=30288.

On the Web: www.sundowntheatre.org and www.watertowertheatre.org/outoftheloop.asp

PLOT SYNOPSIS

Young brothers Christian and Abraham have been cloistered in their house for 16 years, surrounded by trash and moldy mementos, with nothing but a television as their window to the outside world. Their only connection to their family is through a videotape. Their father, now gone for 16 years, taped a pathetic, broken farewell. He offered no explanation for leaving his two boys. Their mother has been gone so long that Christian, the oldest, and Abraham don’t remember her at all. The brothers are afraid of the outside world and panic when the television breaks. They offer gifts to the broken television and, when a secret emerges, the brothers are driven to a cataclysm.

CAST AND CREW

Christian: Ben Darling

Abraham: Cody Lucas

Daddy: Zane Harris

Playwright: Cody Lucas

Director: Christopher David Taylor

Stage manager: Sarah Smith

Set and props design: Tashina Richardson

Costume and makeup design: Olivia Emile

Media design: Christopher David Taylor

Fight choreography: Jeremy Stein