Last week senior Nikaury Roman watched a dream come true as student actors performed a play she wrote this past semester.
Roman's play, "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Please," is a stage-reading about the Posse Foundation in New York City and the journey those students take from the moment they are awarded the scholarship to the end of their first semester at DePauw.
"I knew that I wanted to write a play all along, since I got here," Roman said. "I wanted to write about something that is misunderstood, something that people don't really know about unless they're in it."
A member of the Posse community and a communication major, Roman has been heavily involved with the theater department with acting, dancing and singing but wanted to try something new.
"With all her experience in theater, switching over to playwriting was not that much of a surprise to me," junior Elise Lockwood, president of DePauw's chapter of the theater honor society Alpha Psi Omega, wrote in an email. "She is a great example of a theater student who has tried her hand at just about everything, which is what you have to do at a small school like DePauw."
For Roman, writing a play to challenge herself.
"I'm always looking for ways to be a better version of myself," Roman said. "I never considered myself to be the best writer, but I always had many ideas so I wanted to take the risk."
This risk began last summer, when Roman started brainstorming her play. She thought about the Posse program, and knew that something so important to her was what she wanted to write about.
"There are a lot of misinterpretations about it, and there's just something really beautiful in it," she said. "I wanted to at least give a glimpse to the DePauw community."
While the whole play is not "non-fiction," as Roman put it, she was inspired by actual Posse members, both past and present.
"I combined stories I've heard from scholars, and [they didn't] necessarily have to be in the New York sector of posse," she said. "I combined the struggle; I know that is something many people face."
After writing drafts last semester and revising over Winter Term, she approached senior Elisabeth Sutherland about directing her piece. Sutherland found this job to be a rewarding challenge.
"The process of working on a new play is so different from working on a normal play because you actually have the playwright there," she said. "In 'Stand Clear,' these characters are actually based on real people and it's based on a real program so... [Roman] was very attached to a certain interpretation of it. It was interesting on both sides."
Another challenge for Roman was letting go of control of the script and handing it over to Sutherland and the actors.
"It's very easy to want to cradle the project, because you hear certain characters in your head a different way, so I just had to let go," she said. "I really trusted the director, so [I thought] 'I need to step aside, my job is done.'"
The teamwork of Roman and Sutherland, combined with the actors' hard work, led to the successful performances last Thursday and Friday. Roman could not "believe that it [was] over," but was glad that her play got out there for people to learn more about Posse scholars and to show how important the program is to her and all the other members.
"Posse chooses us to be leaders, but what's beautiful about it is that we're all leaders in different ways," Roman said. "I'm happy that I was able to tell a piece of the Posse story through my craft."