Stephen Lattanzi '08 plays the role of Milo in Five Cups of Coffee.

Stephen Lattanzi, a Bates College senior from Winchester, Mass., is one of two winners of a regional competition in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, held Jan. 29- Feb. 3 at Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, Mass.

Lattanzi will compete nationally in Washington, D.C., in April. The other Region I winner was Michael Zuccola of Northern Essex Community College, in Massachusetts.

“I’m very excited,” Lattanzi says of his win. “It’s an absolutely phenomenal opportunity.”

Along with Lattanzi, two other Bates seniors competed in Fitchburg. Sam Leichter of Wallingford, Pa., took part in the acting trials and Eric Auner of Medford, Mass., competed in sound design.

Two noncompeting scene partners also went. Sophomore Caroline Servat of San Francisco supported Lattanzi, and senior Maggie McCally of Westport, Conn., worked with Leichter.

One of eight across the nation, the Region I competition included schools from all over New England. “There were something like 54 colleges represented,” Lattanzi says. “A huge sampling of really good talent. It was fantastic to see other people’s stuff.”

Leichter adds that Bates’ was one of the smaller theater programs there. “Only five people went from Bates. Boston University, it seemed like, sent their entire school.”

“But we stood out exponentially in terms of how we’d been trained and what Bates had prepared us for,” Lattanzi says.

Both actors have taken part in several Bates productions, including Five Cups of Coffee, The Three Sisters and The Taming of the Shrew. Lattanzi is also the co-founder of the Winchester Cooperative Theatre’s Summer Acting Conservatory, directing an adaptation for high school students of Romeo and Juliet last summer.

For the three rounds of the festival’s regional competition, Lattanzi and Leichter each had to prepare two scenes and a monologue. Lattanzi presented scenes from Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things and William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and a monologue from Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth.

Leichter presented scenes from The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein, and Dying City, by Christopher Shinn, and a monologue from Shakespeare’s King John.

This was the first time in 20 years that Bates has entered the Kennedy Center competition. (Schools enter a specific production in order to participate, although competing students may present material from any play. Bates’ entry was Gillette Elvgren’s play Five Cups of Coffee, produced last fall and directed by Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz.)

Kati Vecsey of the Bates theater faculty calls the competition a great opportunity for aspiring career actors. “Stepping outside of Bates provides a possibility to measure yourself up to other people in this business who are your peers age-wise,” she says. “To compete with people who are going into this profession, it’s really important to see that you are good.”

The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival is a longstanding program involving nearly 20,000 college and university students nationwide. Winners of the regional festivals and showcases will present their work at the national festival at the Kennedy Center April 14-20.

Lattanzi credits the Bates theater department for much of his success. “To be there and to prove ourselves, win or not, among these other schools, speaks volumes about the department,” he says.

A dark romantic comedy about the nature of time and the human condition, Gillette Elvgren’s play Five Cups of Coffee will be performed at Bates College at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, Nov. 1-3, and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 3 and 4.

Performances take place in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for seniors, Bates faculty and staff, and non-Bates students. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz directs Five Cups of Coffee for the Bates theater department’s annual fall production. The college will enter the production in the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival, Bates’ first entry since 1988.

“This is a love story involving a boy and a girl of the age of Bates students,” Kuritz says. “The characters wrestle with a dilemma common to many college students — whether to commit themselves or not, given the rotten state of the world and the troubled history of their own parents’ marriages.”

The protagonist is Hal, a man plagued by the metaphysical implications of time: time past, time lost, future time, no time. He flees his wedding and his bride-to-be, Rita, and takes refuge in Milo’s Gourmet Coffee Shop, where he drinks his very first cup of coffee.

As the story unfolds, Hal and Rita get back together, but he continues his search for the sources and implications of human identity. “The course of their courtship takes them from Milo’s to the battlefields of Iraq, to a hospital emergency room, to the Gates of Paradise,” Kuritz explains.

“Various crises within Hal’s family drive him to seek four more cups of coffee over the coming years, and each cup marks a step in his development.”

So Milo and his coffee shop anchor the action. Elvgren’s experience watching an adult colleague drink coffee for the first time provided the hook for the piece, the playwright explains. But the deeper themes reflect the author’s own fascination with the concept of time.

“One of the enchanting things about consciousness is how it allows us poor human beings to live in different stages of time at any single moment,” Elvgren says. “We have been blessed, and perhaps cursed, with the angst of memory and the fear and delight of the future, all jumbled together in our short span of time on this Earth.”

The play was premiered by the professional Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado, Calif., in 2006.

The playwright, who will attend the play’s opening at Bates, is a professor in theater arts at Regent University, Virginia Beach, Va. Previously, as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, he headed the M.F.A. directing program and served as staff director for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival.

He is co-founder and resident playwright for Saltworks Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, as well as resident writer for Children’s Ministries, Scripture Union, Philadelphia.

Elvgren has been writing for more than 30 years. His plays have been produced by professional theater companies throughout the United States and Canada. There have been approximately 8,000 performances of Elvgren scripts.