Get a Room! The Room Plays 1-4, performing 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 22 in the Fogelson Library.

Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the…Bag Man bite? For its first offering of the semester, the Performing Arts Department is presenting a collection of 10 minute, student-directed plays, among them the “creepy and funny” Bedtime. Taken from a collection of short plays by Steve Yockey entitled “Very Still and Hard to See,” Bedtime follows two young women, Violet and Julie, as Violet reveals that for her whole life, a mysterious “Bag Man” has been killing people close to her. As Julie struggles to understand this strange new aspect of her friend, Violet prepares to take her future into her own hands. “I like the idea of someone taking charge of their life,” says director Julia Rocke, a senior acting major. Rocke, who is having her directorial debut with Bedtime, seems to be filling in the role of director well during a Monday night rehearsal, working with actors one-on-one and giving feedback after each run-through. “I was really nervous just to interpret something and have someone watch it…and get the story right,” she says during a rehearsal break, also commenting that the characteristics of and the dynamics between the two female leads spurred her decision to work on this play. Starring as Violet and Julie are sophomores Sarah Spickard and Kinsey Sarian, who both experienced interesting challenges in their characters. “I’ve never been in a situation before where a) there’s a killer involved and b) where my best friend would put me in harm’s way,” says Sarian. Spickard agrees, saying that “just trying to come up with a rich inner life for this obscene character [Violet] has been a challenge.” With only 10 minutes to communicate character, plot, background and more to an audience, the actors and directors are faced with a hefty challenge...