A scene from Megan Green’s No Child Left Behind. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

On opening night, February 21, theater majors Megan Green ’08 and Patricia Noonan ’07 surreptitiously scrutinized the audience around them. The pair sat in the center of the half-moon of risers fanning up from the stage of the dimly lit Bonn Studio, Boston College’s black-box performance space in the Robsham Theater Arts Center. “We wanted to see people’s expressions, who was laughing, who was whispering,” said Green later. “There is nothing like the thrill of watching a group of people watch your own play.”

Their one-act scripts—Green’s No Child Left Behind, a comedy about a couple preparing to adopt a Chinese baby, and Noonan’s The Storykeeper, a drama about a family stranded in the Mojave Desert—had been selected by the theater department from nearly two dozen submissions to be produced as part of the University’s New Voices series.

Directed by theater professor Scott Cummings, New Voices is Boston College’s first forum dedicated to full-scale production of original student work. Founded in 2005, the series mounts two one-act plays in tandem every two years—it simply takes that long to develop, revise, and produce original work, says Cummings—and it is featured as one of the six shows produced annually during the Robsham season. Like the other five productions, New Voices is given a five-performance run. This past year it played to capacity crowds (upwards of 200) most nights.

Ten minutes before the house lights dimmed, audience members were scanning the curtainless stage’s living room set—one family’s history in the clutter of photographs and yellowing kindergarten artwork, a mantle lined with figurines, side tables overrun with trinkets.

For Green, the room was familiar. The fictional “Green” family in her snappy comedy was loosely based on the real one. As she told a passing well-wisher, she’d prepared her family for the prospect beforehand, “but fingers crossed anyway.” The premise of the play is purely fictional: Two empty-nesters tell their three grown daughters they’ve decided to adopt a baby from Shanghai. The overly cheery mother has an apparent affection for kitty-cat sweaters, the father childproofs couches with plastic wrap and foam rubber, and the daughters think their parents have gone mad.

Noonan’s play, The Storykeeper, would follow nearly an hour later, after intermission, her minimalist stage set a far cry from Green’s—nothing but sere, cracked earth extending to a horizon of bright blue sky. To the far right sits the realistic-looking back end of a dilapidated R.V., with one working door through which the characters will enter and exit. A diabetic grandfather has driven his sleeping family out into the middle of the desert, where they awaken to an empty driver’s seat and an empty gas tank. His family steps out of the R.V. and finds him sitting on the sand; he asks them each, one by one, to tell him a story they’ve told no one else.

In an interview a few weeks after the performances, Cummings spoke about why he chose these one-acts. Aside from the quality of writing and storytelling, he said, the two seemed to complement each other. “Both are about families—but they’re so different in tone and spirit. . . . The two plays together showcased the range of work our students are doing.”

In 1998, Cummings directed his first evening of works by student playwrights under the umbrella title Preliminary Stages, but there wasn’t enough momentum in the theater department or among the students for a regular series. Since that time, Boston College has developed a “vibrant new-play culture,” he says. In the past several years, the undergraduate Dramatics Society has sponsored readings of student plays; After Hours Theater, a two-year-old student-run company, has produced an annual showcase of 10-minute original works; several undergraduates have had 10-minute plays staged or workshopped in the Boston Theater Marathon and other festivals; and last year, BC held its first 24-Hour Theater Experiment, in which a panel of theater professionals judged 10- to 15-minute plays written in the previous 24 hours by teams of students.

Two years ago, new voices featured one-acts by Emily Dendinger ’05 and Richard Lawson ’05. Dendinger’s Swimming After Dark and Lawson’s Zoe—both directed by Cummings—went on to find second lives at the 2006 regional Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where New Voices was one of only seven New England college theater productions featured. In 2006, the Piano Factory in Boston mounted Dendinger’s Swimming After Dark and Lawson’s script was chosen for a staged reading at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska, a 10-day festival started by Edward Albee. Dendinger is now an assistant editor at a publishing house in Boston; Lawson works for a New York company that manages group ticket sales for Broadway shows. Both hope to pursue an MFA in playwriting.

Enrollment in Cummings’s playwriting class has risen since the first New Voices in 2005, and each year brings a greater volume of New Voices submissions, many of them—including Green’s and Noonan’s—penned as class assignments.

“Writing a script is diabolically hard,” says Cummings, but it is only half of the playwriting experience. There is the challenge of collaborating with the director, production staff, and actors, and of participating in the continued developments of the characters and original story. “Anyone thinking of this as a career needs to experience the rewards—and the agonies—of production,” Cummings says. “You never know what you’ve got until you put it up in front of an audience.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg