The play which originally began as a project in her Playwriting I class tells the story of a young girl who learns that her mother has committed suicide. Her mother's tragic death leads the girl, Juliet Limond, to drop out of art school and travel back home to West Virginia, where she lives with her grandmother and tries to make sense of her mother's decision.
"One of the central questions of the play is this girl's mother was trapped in this small town," Laeuchli said. "Something this girl deals with is [the question of], How do I go out and live my life?' That's the question I'd like to provoke in the audience: how are you living your life?"
Throughout the play, Juliet and her grandmother struggle with "shared guilt" and "learning to be a family again," Laeuchli said.
"I wanted to write a story about growing up and about how you learn to be your own person," she said. "It's interesting to me as a college student how do you become the person you're supposed to be, the person you want to be?"
Although "The Rose Garden" is not autobiographical, Laeuchli drew from personal experiences when writing the characters' dialogue and deciding their actions, Laeuchli said. The inclusion of suicide which sparks Juliet's upheaval of her current life came from the memory of Laeuchli's own uncle, who committed suicide "a long time ago," she said.
"The question of suicide has interested me for a while," Laeuchli said. "Particularly for someone who is young, it's difficult to imagine not wanting to live."
Laeuchli said she named the play after a particular scene she imagined "of a rose garden, and someone not wanting to go into a rose garden she used to love to go into," Laeuchli said.
In one scene of "The Rose Garden," Juliet refuses to visit a rose garden in her hometown that she once visited with her mother.
Leauchli originally submitted "The Rose Garden" to the Eleanor Frost and Rush & Loring Dodd Annual Playwriting Festival competition at the end of Fall term upon the encouragement of theater professor Joseph Sutton. The play which Laeuchli estimates will run for approximately 40 minutes will be performed as a stage reading, meaning that the actors do not memorize their lines, but read them from onstage scripts.
"There's a little bit of choreography but not really," Leauchli said.
Although the one-act play also features one male character Martin, Juliet's old childhood friend to whom she can no longer relate Laeuchli writes in a distinctly feminine voice, she said.
"I've always thought it's a shame more people don't write plays for women," she said. "I wanted to write something that was very much for women to act in. As a woman, it's also easier for me to hear the way these people sound in my head."
In her first effort to write a play, Laeuchli said she developed her characters by imagining their possible interactions with one another.
"I just sat down and had conversations in my mind," she said. "You sort of come up with these two people, and sit down with the idea of them."
Laeuchli, who grew up in Arivaca, Arizona, is currently majoring in theater. She also currently serves as president of the student-run Displaced Theater Company and has directed several plays, including "Maine," "The Women of Troy" and "Antigone."
Although she is mainly interested in directing, Laeuchli said she developed a love of all aspects of the theater at a young age.
"I always loved watching plays growing up," she said. "I remember when I was seven or eight, I saw a very bad production of Oklahoma!' but I loved it."
After graduating from high school, Laeuchli worked at the International Theatre company in Vienna for a year before attending Dartmouth.
"I watched a lot of plays, and listened to the way that actors used the language of the play," Laeuchli said. "I watched actors work in plays from people that are much better writers than I am."
During Winter term, Laeuchli traveled to Burkina Faso in Africa to conduct a research project on the different telling-styles of African folk stories. During Spring term, Laeuchli worked on campus with other Dartmouth students to develop the stories she had collected into a performance piece. Although the stories have not been compiled yet, Laeuchli plans to resume work in this coming Fall term.
"There are so many different ways of telling a story," she said. "You bring who you are to whatever story you tell. Depending on who tells the story you get a completely different result, and that's a magical, beautiful thing."
Although Laeuchli finished a draft of "The Rose Garden" prior to leaving for Burkina Faso, she applied elements of story-telling she learned while in Africa to a later draft of her play.
The character of Martin was reworked after Laeuchli's research made her realize that "every person in the play must contribute something meaning to the story," she said.
Ariela Anhalt '11 and Tabetha Xavier '10 will also present original plays in the Eleanor Frost and Ruth & Loring Dodd Annual Playwriting Festival. The award includes a cash prize and an opportunity to receive feedback from members of the New York Theatre Workshop, according to a College press release.
