Leah Maxwell

Student Edge: When Laundry Inspires
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, Winter 2004

Leah Maxwell FP'04, who plans to attend graduate school, hopes more students will discover MHC's "lively little theatre community."

Leah Maxwell FP'04 has discovered something remarkable about her relationship with Mount Holyoke. "I am my own legacy," she laughs. "I came here out of high school, having applied early decision [but left after two years]. When I filled out the application to return as an FP, I wish I'd thought to list myself as a relation who attended Mount Holyoke."

As both a traditional- and a nontraditional-aged student, Leah's passion has been theatre arts. "From the time I could walk, I've been performing. I've also had a passion for writing. But it hadn't occurred to me to combine those passions until I took a playwriting course with the wonderful Rena Down," a visiting lecturer in theatre arts.

This fall, Leah directed a staged reading of her play Folding as part of her senior thesis. The play, "an absurdist romp," features two laundresses folding their way through eternity in a Sisyphean laundry room.

"It was inspired by a playwriting assignment to create a setting and develop a play out of it. I began thinking about a paper I'd written at Monroe Community College-where I'd studied before returning here-on existential courage in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Then I went to get my laundry, but the dryer had ten minutes left. So I sat down, watched the dryer vibrate, and thought about the assignment and Beckett. I realized then that existential courage is a dimension of Plato's cave allegory-recognizing that your reality isn't real and deciding to claw your way out into the true world though it may mean death. That's when it hit me: two women trapped in a laundry room where chutes randomly pelt laundry at them. They're spending eternity folding laundry for no reason they can figure out-and they don't remember anything else."

Because setting is integral to Folding, Leah incorporated a set and costumes into her staged reading. "The emphasis was on 'staged' because it's a very physical piece with lots of movement and gags. Along with the two laundresses, I also cast a director-my doppelganger-who read stage directions-and a stage manager who ran out to throw piles of laundry on the two women. I think it was funny-it worked for me."

As for her legacy experience, Leah, a December graduate, says she's truly completing a circle. "During the years in between, I always wanted to come back to Mount Holyoke. And I'm so very glad I did."