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Friday, Oct. 22, 2021 VOLUME LXXXXVI ISSUE VI SINCE 1935 www.oswegonian.com
Dr. Lewis B. O’Donnell Media Summit returns After being virtual in 2020, event comes back home Annika Wickham Chief Copy Editor awickham@oswegonian.com SUNY Oswego will host the Dr. Lewis B. O’Donnell Media Summit on Oct. 27 with a full day of inperson events planned including special sessions and a live panel in Waterman Theatre. The summit is going back to its previous model which includes both an in-person and a virtual option for students and professors who want to “tune in” to the speakers, according to Event Director Abby Czerwonka. “Going back to in-person is really just the excitement factor,” Czerwonka said. “We’re excited for students to get out of their dorm rooms and get out of their houses and join us for a full day of events.” This year, special sessions, or individual presentations by speakers, begin at 9:10 a.m. in classrooms around campus and via Zoom. There is a discussion with Chrissy
Guest, an associate professor of media, arts, sciences and studies at Ithaca College, following the other speakers before the panel begins at 3 p.m. The theme for the 2021 Media Summit was announced Sept. 13 to be “On-Demand In-Demand: Audiences and the Future of Video Streaming” which Czerwonka said has been an idea for the event for a while. “We had been talking about it for a few years,” Czerwonka said. “We originally had the idea of video streaming last year but we put that on hold because we thought the topic we had last year with COVID and the election was a bit more time sensitive.” The 2020 summit theme was “On the Frontline with the First Amendment” and took place completely virtual via Zoom. Promotions Director Sonya Kordovich said the past few events had all been about trust in the media and though that is important, there are other ideas they
wanted to focus on. “In the last couple years we kind of had the direction of mistrust and fake news,” Kordovich said. “We wanted to steer away to other topics that are relevant in the media such as … audiences and the future of video streaming.” Czerwonka said she hopes this year’s theme resonates with students because they have always been around different types of streaming technology. “The general students around my age, 18-22, we grew up in that transition into video streaming,” Czerwonka said. “We grew up with VCRs and it quickly transformed into DVDs and so we kind of saw the change of how video streaming happened and the big market it created.” She also said the theme will hopefully help prepare students going into a media field after graduation for how fast technology can change.
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Kailee Montross | The Oswegonian
‘Elsewhere’ makes debut, SUNY Oswego theater opens
Chuck Perkins | The Oswegonian Waterman Theatre has hosted several plays in the past but has not see one due to COVID-19 until now.
Abigail Connolly Managing Editor aconnolly@oswegonian.com SUNY Oswego’s first live inperson play since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic opened this week in Tyler Hall’s Waterman Theatre. “Elsewhere,” written by Adam Szymkowicz, follows the story of a young woman, Celia, who is afraid to leave her house. The narrative follows Celia as she attempts to figure out ways to rejoin society while relying on others to pull her out of her loneliness. SUNY Oswego professor and director of “Elsewhere,” Steven Mazzoccone, was drawn to the play because of its relevance to feelings of isolation and loneliness during the pandemic. “This is a play about a woman who is afraid to go outside and be part of the world,“ Mazzoccone said. “There’s a lot of talk and imagery in the play regarding loneliness, isolation and how that creates habits. One of the things I am curious about now is what habits have we fallen into because we were all experiencing the pandemic last year ... That, as far as story is what really connected with me.” Categorized as a “dark comedy,” “Elsewhere,” takes some of the universal feelings of pandemic life and uses them in a humourous and enlightening way throughout the play. Senior creative writing
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and applied mathematics major, Andrew Buyea, landed the role of Teddy, an unsuspecting delivery driver that fell into Celia’s world of loneliness. Buyea said that the role was both challenging and humorous for him. “My character is where a lot of the comedy comes form,” Buyea said. “My character is not smart ... I think I went in with a serious take on stuff and had to quickly learn ‘Oh no, my character is not the serious one,’ everyone else’s character is the serious one, I am just there to be good.” Over the course of two months, the cast and crew of “Elsewhere” spent a great deal of time learning and adapting to their roles in the play. The dark comedy is also an abstract play that holds a number of subtle stage directions, lines and actions. Buyea said that this was a challenge for the cast to work through. “For the play as a whole, I would say there are probably a lot of little things people might not pick up on,” Buyea said. “We did table work for like two weeks, literally just reading the play and talking about it ... We learned a lot of cool things. Even the director, after a month into the play realized why we were doing something and would say ‘Oh I didn’t realize that line is as funny as it is until now.’”
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