Support Andrew's Thesis and Help Bring a New Play to Life

We the People of These Fifty Acre Woods is a new play that I’ve written and developed as my MFA Thesis for my degree in playwriting at Columbia University. This script is a culmination of all the lessons and discoveries I’ve made during my time in the program. As a playwright who writes expansive and spectacle filled plays, I wanted to push myself to create something epic in scope for my final graduate school presentation. And, in continuing my style of bringing classic stories into a contemporary lens, I was inspired by two sources: A.A. Milne’s timeless 100 Acre Wood characters and Hollywood war films.

For the past year and a half, Columbia MFA Director Calvin Atkinson and I have been bringing this script through numerous drafts, workshops, and development readings in New York City. Through all of these, I have discovered countless connections between A.A Milne’s own experience serving in both World Wars and the desire to escape into a place of whimsy. Now, we have the wonderful opportunity to mount the first fully realized production at Columbia where we hope to showcase the legs this script has.

A production of this size comes with challenges. Financial support and resources are harder to come by since this show is still tied to academia restrictions. The goal of this fundraiser is to allow this production to be performed the way we envision. Your donations will go towards compensation for all of our talented artists (including our wonderful actors and designers) and supporting various production needs to bring this play to life in the most magical ways possible.

Now more than ever, I believe this play to be culturally relevant for so many reasons. Growing up in Virginia and as a former teacher, I always found it fascinating how education drastically varied from one county to the next. More specifically, how history could be taught as truth and fact, but everyone had their own belief of what was "real" history. And when it comes to war, history is often said to be written by the victor. But, what happens when the victor decides to omit certain information from the story? This dark and whimsical civil war epic doesn’t just explore questions about violence and defending your beliefs - it interrogates the concept of history and how it gets written.

More about the show:

Inspired by A.A. Milne’s classic characters, the beloved 100 Acre Wood is in the midst of a civil war. Throughout this multi-year conflict, childhood friends Winnie, Christopher, and H.P. Piglet finds themselves on different paths. H.P. struggles with the moral dilemmas of being a soldier, Christopher discovers what can happen when the powerless gain power, and Winnie is on the run for dodging the draft. Part war epic, part whimsical absurdism, this play looks at how people justify violence, the lengths you’ll go to defend what you believe in and if fire is fought with fire - will the acres just burn to the ground?