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By Julie Rausch

WSU alumna Jeannine Saunders’ play, “The Great Frozen Man,” came from the depths of her senses, imagining what might have been going through her grandfather’s 63-year-old mind as he lay in bed day after day, year after year, the victim of a stroke which paralyzed him from the neck down.

The play, winner of WSU’s annual National Playwriting Competition, will be performed Nov. 12-15 in the Campus Activities Center Theater.

Over the last decade Saunders, who also teaches part time in WSU’s School of Performing Arts, has written a variety of plays for the stage, several of which have been produced at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kans., where she earned a degree in English. One, “Wheat Queens,” was chosen as winner of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, Region V, best full-length unproduced script (1995). Saunders is a member of The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis and has studied under the tutelage of Jeffrey Sweet, playwright and author of “The Dramatists Source Book.”

In May, Saunders graduated with a master’s in communication/theater and was accepted this fall into WSU’s creative writing program.

“The Great Frozen Man” is about isolation and lost relationships, Saunders says. The play is based on what Saunders imagines her grandfather might have been thinking during five long, bedridden years, and the play is not without bittersweet irony and humor.

Saunders was in the fourth grade when her grandfather had a stroke. She remembers a man who could “breathe and swallow baby food, and that’s all he could physically do.” He died when she was in the ninth grade. Years later, Saunders’ mother told her he had no brain damage.

“So here was a man who sat for how many odd years and watched television with a perfectly functioning brain. That bothered me for a long time,” Saunders says.

The audience will be able to see inside the mind of the character Arlin MacGaughey and consider the relationship between him and his family and caregivers.

“The Great Frozen Man” was the subject of Saunders’ master’s thesis and is dedicated to the loving memory of her grandfather, Lawrence Dwyer, and to her grandmother, Maxine Dwyer.

Tickets are $7, with discounts for senior citizens and students. Call ext. 3233 for reservations.

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