October 8, 1999

Professor's play wins international competition

A play by Ernest Ferlita S.J., professor of drama and speech, won second place in the International Competition of Religious Drama for the Jubilee of the Year 2000. The play titled MA-FA is based on the life of Adam Schall, a Jesuit astronomer in China. Another play by Ferlita, The Witness, revolves around the interrogation of a witness to the murder of six Jesuits and two women in El Salvador. The Witness was selected for the Love Creek Production 1999 Summer One-act Festival in New York.

Ferlita has authored 10 books, 20 plays, two librettos, and numerous articles. Among the plays are Black Medea, staged at the first Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston; it was given three Off-Off Broadway productions and won four awards at the fifth annual Black Theatre Festival. Another play, The Truth of the Matter, won the Miller Award in the 1986 Deep South Writers Conference. Besides Black Medea, other plays have been produced Off-Off BroadwayThe Obelisk and the most recent, Two Cities, a double bill of one-act plays, The Mask of Hiroshima (published in Best Short Plays 1989) and The Bells of Nagasaki. The Mask of Hiroshima won the Christian Theatre Artist Guild prize in 1977; adapted for radio under the title The City of Seven Rivers, it took third prize in the International Catholic Radio Drama Competition in 1982 and first prize in the 1985 American Radio Theatre Scriptwriting Competition.

La'Tesha Wilson, A'01 Intern in the Offices of Public Affairs and Publications