The play’s eponymous main character is a power-hungry monkey who accompanies a monk on a long, action-filled westward journey filled with numerous run-ins with demons and other colorful characters, assistant director theatre freshman Ian Klahre said.

“Since we audition in the spring for fall shows, freshmen weren’t able to be in a show during their first semester," Monkey King director and theatre professor Deric McNish said. "The Freshman Showcase gives every incoming student the opportunity to be in a main stage show of their own."

The writing team had two and half weeks to write the script, but made the most of their collective creative resources.

“You have a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of ideas working with a great story that has a lot of content,” psychology and theatre freshman Mickey Kost said. “We had to try and accommodate these ideas and also condense the story.”

The Monkey King marked the second time the showcase has been an original production by MSU students.

“In typical theatre, a playwright provides a script, which is interpreted by the director, designers and actors," McNish said. "In devised theater, we begin with nothing but a group of creative artists and some kind of inspiration.” 

The play required contributions from students willing to go outside their traditional knowledge base.

“I don’t think all the people who did set painting had done much of that before, but they still said, 'hey if you teach me I will help out with that,' some people helped with fixing costumes and they had never sewn a button in their lives,” fight choreographer and Residential College in the Arts and Humanities freshman Elizabeth Sauter said.

The play’s limited budget combined with the play’s action heavy content necessitated innovation from those charged with creating the play’s special effects.

“We are able to create things like mountains, rivers and trees with bodies and then allow the audience’s imagination to fill in the details” McNish said.

The Monkey King is a part of MSU’s China Experience program and as such the cast and crew wanted to ensure the play was true to the source material’s culture.

“In developing the play we’ve not only used the story’s text but we’ve had some international students from China come in from the English Language Center and work with the cast, and even had some join the cast,” McNish said.

This year marks another exciting run of shows for MSU. MSU’s last fall show will be an original piece from Dec. 10-13 entitled The December Project.

The spring semester will feature large-scale adaptations of Grease, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, And Away We Go and Xtigone.