Ottawa University

OU Presents Premiere of Kansas City Playwright's "Face Value"

The judges will be watching!

OTTAWA, Kansas - OUTheatre will present the world premiere of Face Value, an original play by renowned Kansas City playwright Frank Higgins, on Thursday, October 18, at 8:30 p.m. in the Larry Peters Auditorium on the Ottawa University campus, 1001 S. Cedar Street, Ottawa, Kansas. Additional performances are scheduled for 8:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights during the University's Homecoming Weekend. Tickets are $5.00 at the door.

Face Value centers around Kris (Meagan Wilcox), an overweight and less-than-beautiful TV anchor who is fired due to bad ratings. Kris opts to have plastic surgery to change her image and reemerges as the beautiful Desiree. Through humor, the play explores the effect that image perceptions have on us, utilizing a symbolic set of glass furniture and mirrors to help drive home the point. According to OUTheatre Director Jeanne Chinn, some of the funniest moments of the play occur when the characters break "out of time" and attempt to "sell" their points of view by speaking directly to the audience.

Though Higgins is an award-winning playwright, he is less concerned with acclaim for his play than with the audience response to it. "The joy comes from doing the work and having an audience see a play that touches them in both their hearts and minds. You want it to be entertaining, but not just entertaining," said Higgins.

In addition to Meagan Wilcox as Kris, the cast for the play includes OU Technical Director Joel Williams as Herb, freshman Lauren Frazier as Kerri, senior Krystal Camille White as F. Margaret Maxwell, and continuing education student Kelli Tyner as Debi. Small cameos will be acted out by freshman Jared Boyer and Assistant Director Lydia Shontz. The student technical director for the show is senior John Higginbotham; lighting design is being done by Ron Chinn.

Higgins' Face Value is OUTheatre's Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) entry to be judged by a selector from South Dakota and a respondent from Emporia State University in Kansas. If selected, the show will move on to the regional competition in Omaha, Nebraska, in January 2008.

Chinn met Higgins during a production that the two worked on together in Lawrence, Kansas, last year. That connection set the stage for selecting OUTheatre to debut Higgins' play Face Value. Higgins has another play in production that is set to debut in Houston, Texas, during the same weekend that Face Value premieres.

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Founded in 1865, Ottawa University is a comprehensive, not-for-profit educational institution. Ottawa University's educational mission brings together a residential campus in Ottawa, Kansas, and adult campuses in Kansas City, Missouri; Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe, Arizona; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Jeffersonville, Indiana; as well as multiple international instructional sites.  For more information, visit http://www.ottawa.edu/.