Jake Nurkin was walking toward his college library when he received an email that stopped him in his tracks. Though the message was short and to the point, the college student’s eyes scanned it several times, certain there was some sort of mistake.
“Wait a minute—me? Are you sure?” Those words were all that Nurkin could think as he read and re-read the email on his phone regarding a playwriting contest that Jake had entered a few weeks prior. Jake’s play, “Backwoods Beast,” had won second place in the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation’s annual student and alumni playwright competition.
Jittery with excitement, the college student walked around campus and shared the news with those close to him, first calling his mom, and then informing some close friends.
“There was definitely a feeling of surprise and elation that I could feel inside me that was coming out of my body,” Nurkin told the Mississippi Free Press. “I just needed to move around.”
Nurkin, a Hattiesburg native and senior at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, wrote “Backwoods Beast” in his junior year as the final assignment of a course titled “Plays About History.” After reading his play, Nurkin’s professor Lavinia Roberts recommended he submit “Backwoods Beast” to the Student Playwriting Contest.
“It was a really strong play,” Roberts told the Mississippi Free Press. ”It has a lot of voice to it. It has a sense of theatricality, really interesting symbolism and motifs. It explored really interesting themes in a really subtle way. I fully wanted to encourage him to submit it to this contest.”
‘I Just Want to Be Open’
Roberts’ course is what is known at Hendrix College as a Murphy Tutorial: a class specifically designed for students in the college’s Murphy Scholars program, a cross-discipline cohort of students who are specifically interested in the study of literature and language. The final project of this course tasked students with writing a 10-minute play inspired by a quotation from poetry etched into a walkway outside of Hendrix College’s Student Life Center.
While searching the sidewalk for inspiration, Nurkin found a quote from Charles Wesley’s “Wrestling Jacob,” a Methodist Hymn from 1740 that tells the biblical story of Jacob wrestling an angel in the wilderness—a story that Wesley uses as a metaphor for his own conversion to Christianity.
“It was definitely like a contrast to all these quotes that were, like, ‘You can do anything—be inspired, go out and explore!’ … it was very confrontational,” Nurkin said. “That one appealed to me, because I always like things that are odd out of the bunch.”
The confrontation of “Backwoods Beast” is not between man and religion as in Wesley’s hymn, but between a man and his obsession. The play opens with the main character Wes hunting the mythical Backwoods Beast, a large, smelly, ape-like cryptid with glowing red eyes that the play’s author describes as “a mix between Bigfoot and a dire wolf.” To Wes’s surprise, he actually finds the creature and kills it out of fear.
The rest of the play follows this character’s downward spiral as his expectations of this discovery’s implications are continuously unmet. Instead of finding fame for discovering this legendary creature, he taxidermies the cryptid and displays it as a roadside attraction to very little acclaim. He externalizes his unhappiness onto this creature, grows depressed, and the play ends with Wes alone and ranting at the Backwoods Beast.
To its author, “Backwoods Beast” displays the dangerously gray area between curiosity and obsession.
“Curiosity can be a wonderful thing; it lets us explore, makes us wonder,” Nurkin said. “But I think (“Backwoods Beast”) also shows that if you go too far in, if you get obsessed with something, it’s easy to lose sight of what you already have.”
What Nurkin’s character lost sight of was community; in his obsession, Wes self-isolated and drew away from his friends and family, stuck to the idea that, with enough time, his creature would make him rich and famous. Nurkin wanted to focus on this character’s experience of isolation due to his own past experience with loneliness, particularly during his sophomore year of college when “all the worst things happened at the same time.”
“It was an emotionally and mentally racking time for me,” the Hendrix College senior said. “I had a lot of times where I felt lonely, and I kind of wanted to use (the play) to talk about the dangers of how if you get too caught up in something, it’s easy to be a recluse and lose the things that you once held dear.”
But despite his play’s warning, this young playwright intends to continue embodying curiosity in his everyday life.
“So much that can happen in such a short amount of time, or even in a long amount of time, can change your life. So I just want to be open.”
The Liberal Arts Experience
Despite winning a contest in playwriting, Jake Nurkin is not a playwright by major or trade. In fact, “Backwoods Beast” is one of the student’s first plays, and he only began writing plays as part of his “Plays About History” course.
Instead, Nurkin is a computer scientist. Prior to attending Hendrix College, Nurkin did not have experience in computer science; rather, he spent much of his time performing. In high school, Nurkin took theater classes, was a part of the Center Stage theater group, and even performed as the sword-and-shield wielding knight mascot of the Sacred Heart Catholic School Crusaders.
“I found that acting was great to help me find more of myself through being able to play another part,” Nurkin said.
Nurkin enrolled at Hendrix College as “undeclared” and spent his first year at the liberal-arts college exploring the different disciplines he could potentially pursue as a major. To the 21-year-old, this freedom to explore a wide variety of disciplines allowed him to quickly discover his interest in computer science.
“(Hendrix College is) very much into the liberal-arts experience,” Nurkin said. “My freshman year, I think it was in the spring semester, I took an introduction to computer science kind of class, and I really fell in love with it—with the way that coding works. That was really fun to me.”
The aspiring computer scientist continues to find ways to stay involved with theater as a college student. Nurkin is currently a member of the Hendrix Players, through which he has performed in plays such as Edward Allan Baker’s “Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Beauty, and Truth” and the troupe’s original piece “(Title) Unknown,” amongst others.
Being involved in both art and science has informed the way that Nurkin approaches both disciplines.
“Writing and acting and theater are more about expressing things that aren’t necessarily concrete, but are more expressive in nature. Computer science and programming, code, math, that kind of thing that definitely uses a logical kind of thinking,” Nurkin said.
“It’s interesting in the ways that they can interact,” he continued. “Like, what is the logic as to why (a performer is) acting like this? What is the logic to why this play is constructed this way? And then on the other end, how can you construct this in a fun way? What fun things that you can do with this? What can you express through code?”
Hendrix College students can enter the 38th Student Playwriting Contest next year. Deadlines for submissions are typically in February, though an exact date has yet to be announced. Cash prizes are awarded to first-place and second-place winners. For more information, visit hendrixmurphy.org/page/playwriting-contests.
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