A bizarre fictional scenario involving an Oscar-nominated actor and a love story born in grade school, both written by SF State students, will debut at the One Act Festival in the Creative Arts building on Oct. 13.



Geraldine Kim’s “Donning Cheadle” and Tony Carrillo’s “The Gypsy Frog” are being directed by SF State theatre professor and longtime director Bill Peters. “It’s always an inspiring thing to be around this type of energy,” said Peters. “Both of them have a hunger to learn, test things out and are eager to participate in the experience.”



Kim’s “Donning Cheadle” is based on an imagined scenario of the actor Don Cheadle prior to his “Hotel Rwanda” fame.



Short on work, Cheadle resorts to taking on an independent gig filmed at his house where he is staying with a Korean family in Massachusetts- while posed as their daughter.



The idea of “Donning Cheadle” came to the graduate student (who’s pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts in creative writing) in her sleep.



In her dream, Kim woke up as Don Cheadle, a delusion she described as a “total Lao Tzu moment.”



She asked herself if she was Don Cheadle, the proverbial butterfly, or if it was the reversal.



“This play was a processing of that funny yet very serious question,” said Kim, 22.



“I went through his daily routine; trudging through the grocery store and dating Queen Latifah.”



Kim said she hopes that the audience will find it humorous.
Ben Baker, SF State drama graduate of 2000, and one of the four cast members, auditioned specifically for the lead and got it. “...Don Cheadle is the main event, the title role, the protagonist,” said Baker, 29.



The role of “Cameragirl” will be played by theatre/performance junior Katharine Gibbons, 27, who’s character “picked Cheadle to be in the movie in which I follow and film him.”



Creative Arts major, Tony Carrillo’s, “The Gypsy Frog” is also premiering at One Act.



The play centers around 18-year-old Docsi Lee and his overbearing Romanian mother. It tells a tragic love story involving Irene, a girl who has teased and admired Lee since the third grade.



Carrillo’s play was inspired by a story his mother told him about a gypsy boy named Miller, who was his mother’s first kiss.



“The boy moved away but my mother... she never forgot, and I don’t know why; perhaps the affection in her voice, or the glimpse into my mother’s youth, but I didn’t want to forget that feeling, so I wrote this play as a type of response,” said Carrillo, 26.



Though he was moved by the story, Carrillo said he doesn’t expect the audience to be, rather he hopes to evoke tangible emotions from them.
“I want to make them become so a part of this world that they forget what they are watching is purely artifice.



“Theatre should do this — it should influence, it should affect; it should make people think.”