by Emily Snell | Jun 9, 2012 | News Slider
The power of social media is all too evident to today’s teenagers. When technology abuse causes two girls to ruin each other, parents and school officials intervene, struggling to create peace and reconciliation. This reality is the center of “Exposure,” a play written, directed and performed by Lipscomb students. “I think it’s a play that speaks particularly to parents, and I hope parents in the audience are encouraged to be good parents, especially in a world that has changed a lot with social media and technology,” said Director Sawyer Wallace, a recent Lipscomb graduate. The play, written by senior Whitney Vaughn, a double major in theater and Law, Justice and Society, won the playwriting competition at last year’s Christian Scholars’ Conference. It was performed June 6-9 during the 2012 conference on campus. The Christian Scholars’ Conference annually brings together Christian scholars from various academic backgrounds “to develop their own academic research and to reflect on the integration of scholarship and faith.” As described in the play’s program, the work is “a riveting play about a high school guidance counselor’s attempt to reconcile two teenage girls who have used social media to destroy each other’s lives. It exposes the pervasive quality of social media and the damaging effects of poor parenting.” Vaughn, who is interning in Washington, D.C. with the Republican National Committee, said the idea for the play came last year when she was in Mike Fernandez’s playwriting class. Fernandez told the students to consider the big moments in their lives and find common denominators between the events. “The common denominator in all of the good and bad that I’ve been...
by Crystal Davis | Mar 30, 2012 | News Slider
You would think walking in to a Green Hills movie theater at 10:25 on a Sunday night that it would be empty. Not that night! It was full! Friends with Kids, the new movie with several members of the Bridesmaids cast, had minimal promotion in Nashville, but apparently it was a smash. Newcomer Jennifer Westfeldt and Jason Scott find themselves the only single people in a group of close-knit friends. The movie addresses that sensitive time of people’s lives when they make the transition between life without major responsibilities to life with families and kids and all that comes after. Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm and Chris O’Dowd round out the cast and provide most of the comic relief. Westfeldt and Scott play best friends who decide they want to have kids after their close friends have children and embrace married life. The movie addresses the good times and the rough times throughout the journey of Westfeldt and Scott having a child and raising it in a divorced-parent-like style. It gives some alternative views of how to raise a family in a non-traditional lifestyle. It’s not something most people are familiar with coming out of a Christian school, but it has become more and more the norm in the last couple of generations. This R-rated film includes some scenes with semi-censored sexual activities, which may be offensive to some people. There’s an abundance of foul language, not appropriate for a younger audience. I think all of these situations are intended to be funny and thought provoking; the director tries to produce a bigger picture–a romantic comedy wrapped up in the...
