Wichita State celebrates 50 years of its student playwriting competition with bloody 'The Angel of Death'
The national competition has developed shows by young playwrights for half a century. This year's winner is on stage this week.
Bela Kiralyfalvi was among the quarter-million people who fled his homeland after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which lasted 15 days before being brutally quashed by the Soviet Union. He emigrated to the U.S. and, in 1974, joined the WSU theater department. In addition to his directing and teaching duties, he led a new playwriting program in the growing department and created what became the Bela Kiralyfalvi National Student Playwriting Competition, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.
“As a WSU graduate student, I learned so much from Dr. Kiralyfalvi,” said Jeannine Saunders Russell, who teaches script analysis and scriptwriting for WSU’s School of Performing Arts and who herself was a winner of the 1997 competition.“After I began teaching theater for WSU, I had the honor of serving as administrator of this contest, which offers emerging student writers from all universities an opportunity that may not have been available if Bela hadn’t brought this contest to fruition.”
Competition winners are selected by WSU theater faculty through a blind submission process, meaning that the playwrights’ names are unknown to the judges. Out of its 50 years, seven winning plays — including this year’s — have been written by WSU students.
“Bela was always super supportive of us,” said Dean Corrin, a WSU alumnus who was among the playwriting students in Kiralyfalvi’s first semester at WSU and whose comedy “Always” was produced in the competition’s second year. “He empowered students rather than restricting them.”
And when it came time to revise, “he left us on our own. He paved the way to learn how to do it. Revising is scary because you’re afraid you’ll break whatever you had. He helped us understand that writing is not something mystical but actual work.”
The broad nature of the competition’s plays and playwrights extends well beyond geography.
Corrin’s comedy “Always” is about star-crossed lovers, including one who communicates via Irving Berlin-esque songs. It ends with the save-the-day arrival of a guy on a motorcycle named Deus Ex Machina. The tone is in marked contrast to this year’s winning script, written nearly half a century later. “The Angel of Death” is a dramatization of raw fury and retribution written by Amanda Schmalzried, another WSU theater student and a playwright heavily influenced by Ryan Murphy, who created the TV series “American Horror Story,” among others.
“The Angel of Death” will receive a public reading March 6-8 at the Welsbacher Theatre at the Eugene M. Hughes Metropolitan Complex. (Editor’s note: the writer of this article is related to the theater’s namesake.)
The Right Pair
Cheyla Clawson, WSU’s director of the School of Performing Arts, has made a habit of bringing in talented guest artists for varied theater, dance, musical theater, and interdisciplinary projects. For this undertaking, she nabbed Jane Gabbert, who graduated from WSU’s theatre department in 1977 and now lives in New York, where she continues a lifelong career as an actor and teacher.
Gabbert, who often visits family in town, had been in touch with WSU about supporting the school and was introduced to Clawson. “We really hit it off,” she said. “Cheyla asked me if I’d like to do a project.” As one of the original members of The 42nd Street WorkShop — now the Workshop Theater — Gabbert works with new scripts "all the time."
Of Schmalzried's, she said, “I read it and thought this is her first play? It’s rough and tumble; it addresses pent-up rage — specifically female rage, what a person might do to grapple with injustice, seek revenge. It’s a morality piece.”
Speaking of her partnership with Schmalzried, Gabbert added, “We are the right pair. Amanda and I share the same outrage regarding the continued abuse of women, how they’ve been treated over the centuries — and especially at this time. She’s very talented and has a wonderful facility in mixing farce with violent fantasy.”
Schmalzried, who graduates this spring with a Bachelor of Arts in performing arts with an emphasis in theater and certificates in directing and filmmaking, has followed a crooked path. From a small town near McPherson, Kansas, she received a scholarship to the University of Redlands in California, where she had her eye on a career in theater. But after the scholarship year ran out, she returned to Kansas and “got swept into the corporate world,” rising through the ranks at Pfizer until she realized she wasn’t honoring her “soul and heart.”
At 23, she quit and returned to college, this time at WSU, chosen initially for proximity and affordability, “but I also learned to love it. People really care, which is the reason I stayed and want to continue to write.”
Writing Rage
The seeds of “The Angel of Death” were planted in June 2022 with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case codifying reproductive rights. The ruling horrified Schmalzried and a group of her peers and led to early work under the tutelage of WSU’s Russell, the theater instructor.
“There was so much anger. It felt larger than us, almost ancestral, coming from something spiritual that I had been tapped into,” Schmalzried said. She noted society’s discouragement of women to express anger and began asking what it might look like if someone powerless suddenly had power and a means of retribution: “If she was so furious, she went off the rails and gave into anger.”
In the play, Alicia, trained by her mother to enter the family profession as a serial killer, has instead chosen to address wrongs as a social worker. But when, facing her powerlessness to genuinely help the children on her caseload, she encounters demonic tempter Damien and she decides to continue her mother’s legacy. The play “follows her mindset as she kills, as she turns from good to evil,” Schmalzried said.
“There’s a ton of blood,” she noted, adding that there will be trigger warnings (now called “content notes”) and that people who might feel uncomfortable should consider staying away.
Indeed, the decision to present the play as a reading without staging, costumes, or other production elements well suits the script’s bloody violence.
“The play is heavily visual and fierce and active,” Gabbert said. “To try to include staging would not serve it. At this stage, the playwright needs to hear the play read out loud (and) watch audience reactions.” A talkback will follow each reading.
Ian Moore, also a senior theater major, serves as the assistant director and is in the cast. Moore assistant-directed the production of last year’s winning play and has had other directing credits, particularly through WSU’s student-led Empty Space Theatre. But this is his first experience having the playwright on hand during the rehearsal period.
“Amanda’s being here is special,” he said. “We can get into her mindset behind what she wrote.”
The character Moore plays, Deadbeat Dad, “is horrible.” Finding a way to play such a loud, aggressive, and unapproachable person was a new experience for him.
Kiralyfalvi, who later in his career served as chair of the School of Performing Arts, retired in 2003 and died last fall. In a memorium, Russell wrote, “He was an incredible educator. He was an incredible person. He’ll be sorely missed.”
Corrin, the 1976 winner, is associate dean of the Theatre School at DePaul University. A nationally produced playwright, he has also been an active participant in theater companies, most recently Birchhouse Immersive, which has been commissioned to create a show for the Goodman School of Drama’s centennial this November.
As for the competition’s most recent winner, Schmalzried has been encouraged to apply to competitive graduate programs, and she has compiled her own list of the ones that most interest her.
But first, she plans to take off time to write — her current project involves deep-dive research into Greek mythology — and “to do whatever my heart needs.”
The Details
The Wichita State School of Performing Arts presents the staged reading “The Angel of Death,"
7:30 p.m. March 6–8, 2025, at the Welsbacher Theatre in the Eugene M. Hughes Metropolitan Complex, 5015 E. 29th St. N. in Wichita
The performance runs 45-50 minutes with a 10-minute break, followed by a talkback.
General-admission tickets are $15. WSU students can present their student ID and get a free advance ticket at the Fine Arts Box Office in Duerksen Fine Arts Center during operating hours.
Content note: The play contains extreme, frequent violence.
Visitor notes: The Welsbacher Theater is on the east side of the Metroplex at Oliver and 29th Streets. The black box theater seats are arranged in an L formation of rows with clear views from virtually any seat. Accessible seating is available.
Learn more and buy tickets online.
Corrections: This story was updated on March 6 to correct two mistakes: The playwright's name is Amanda Schmalzried, not Schmalzreid, and the title of her play is "The Angel of Death," not "Angel of Death." We regret the errors.
Anne Welsbacher writes plays, nonfiction, and book and theater reviews. She is the performing arts editor for this publication. awelsbacher.com
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