Freeks and Geeks: Laura Petree Takes on Stanford Theater

When sophomore Laura Petree was young, her parents called her the biggest ham. “I don’t understand how people don’t know what that means!” she said with a laugh as we sat in her sunlight filled triple in Haus Mitt. “I was voted most likely to be president when I was in preschool. I was always acting because I wanted people to look at me.”

While Petree’s aspirations are far from the White House—instead she dreams of being a director at the National Theater in London—she still demands the spotlight. In the fall, she and Ashley Chung, a senior with whom she attended high school, founded a free and independent theater society on campus called the Freeks. The group, which remains defiantly unofficial, came about when director Petree and producer Chung were denied funding for their fall play, Cowboy Mouth, on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘academic’ enough. “That’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to create something visceral and raw and exciting,” said Petree, who felt that turning the play into an academic project would undermine her excitement for the material.

The two made the necessary cuts and took advantages of resources and friends’ generosity in order to pull together the production, whose final costs totaled $60. One student even hand-wired the lights. “I was sitting in the back corner of Cowboy Mouth pressing these buttons that he had done on this beer box and flipping them to make the lights work. It was so cool,” laughs Petree, whose excitement stems from her desire to evoke something raw and true, regardless of practical constraints.

In contrast with shows on campus with budgets in five figures that charge admission to cover their costs, Petree believes that art should be free for college students.  Instead of charging for Cowboy Mouth, Petree put out a donation box and ended up making back exactly the amount of money she needed. The low budget jives with the Freeks’ mission statement, part of which reads, “We believe that art can be made with loose change and friends and tough fucking hustler heart.”

Originally a group of six who were involved with Cowboy Mouth, which Petree describes as “the Freeks’ coming-out show,” the society is expanding. With upwards of 30 members, Petree is most excited when other people are excited by what she’s doing. Hearing cast members tell her that her work is fresh, exciting, and everything they’ve been looking for makes Petree optimistic about the group’s future, even though she doesn’t know what direction it will take. “Free independent performance is the Freeks. Ideally, I want it to be that anyone who is creating free independent performance can use the name ‘the Freeks’ without contacting me or contacting anyone in the Freeks. I want it to just be this thing that happens and then you’re a Freek once you’ve done it.”

For Petree, being a Freek means pushing boundaries. “We want something that gets people excited and that is different from all the theater that’s happening on campus, which I think is straightforward. It’s not doing something different. It’s not trying something new. It’s not pushing boundaries. That’s what college theater is supposed to do. When you are in college you are supposed to be experimenting, as opposed to all these musicals. It’s like, we’re doing a musical again! Great. I don’t give a fuck. I want to do something weird.”

Despite her obsession with bows and the specificity of her deep magenta colored hair, Petree’s directorial interests are broad. She’s currently thinking about horror theater (as opposed to horror movies) and in her fall project, Rhinoceros, she hopes to experiment with the process of being tainted while exploring how the set can ‘melt,’ echoing the characters’ physical transformations. “I’m interested in seeing how you can push a straight play or if it is a straight play that’s already pushing boundaries, I want to ask why is it interesting and why it is relevant to this community. I’m also interested in taking a play and messing with it and seeing where you can go with it.” Her catch-word is transformation. “A lot of times that’s what draws me to a play—characters that transform or a world that transforms.”

Petree finds traditional theater boring and the Stanford theater scene tepid at best, herself striving for art that is “fresh and intimate and fearless and weird.” This quarter, her project is Titus, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s lesser-known play Titus Andronicus. However, rather than being set in Rome, Petree’s version takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and is inspired by Sleep No More. Based on Macbeth, Sleep No More is an immersive theatrical experience where multiple scenes are occurring simultaneously in multiple locations. “The idea is that you are getting the story of a character as opposed to understanding exactly what’s happening in the entire thing.” Titus has become an in-depth character study that challenges Petree to let go of her control as director.

Through Cowboy Mouth, Titus, and Rhinoceros, Petree finds a deep resonance between her work and the state of the arts scene (or lack thereof) on the Stanford campus. She finds Cowboy Mouth’s message particularly relevant: “For me it was about suppressing your art and not allowing yourself to follow your passion or have an art. I know many people who are very artistic, or have artistic tendencies, but because of this campus, they don’t allow themselves to follow that.” However, things aren’t so dire. Artists like Petree, committed to making “art that accesses everyone,” have the potential to transcend Stanford’s stifling technical stereotypes and create art that is terrifying in its weirdness, fresh in its dedication, and transformative in its passionate and intellectual exuberance.