The collaborations between two students in the theater department at Emporia State led to a tree house comedy.

Mark Warner, senior theater major, and Brandon Jensen, junior theater major, presented a newly rewritten version of their comedy “The Tree House Effect” on Sept. 7 in Fredrickson Theatre.

“We threw it together in about a month,” Warner said. “I had the idea for the play and Brandon is great with dialogue, so I started working with them on it.”

The play was performed as a script reading with Lexey St. Jost, senior theater major, narrating the action. Jensen said he and Warner wanted an audience’s opinion on the new version.

“We did a couple of rewrites over the summer,” Jensen said. “There was a lot of emailing back and forth.” In the play, three friends – Jeremy, who is recently engaged and spends all of the free time he can in his childhood tree house in his parents’ backyard; Lucas, an uptight and married advertising executive and Tyson, a pot-smoking slacker who lives on the fringe – bond over Dungeons & Dragons, marijuana and Jimi Hendrix, while pondering their future and trying to escape their fears of growing up and “turning into zombies.”

In the play, Lucas is contemplating his marriage to his slightly more uptight wife, Kate – played by senior theatre major Annie Rosenbrook. During the climax of the play, Kate confronts Lucas about spending too much time with Jeremy and Tyson in the tree house and being over five hours late to their dinner date, but the two make up by the end of the play.

“They may be in the point in their relationship where they are past apologies,” said Andrew McCutcheon, junior theater major.

Warner said the character of Kate was originally meaner and much less forgiving than in the new version. Warner and Rosenbrook said it seemed that the audience liked the change.

“I had a blast working with my peers like this,” said Colter Lemmon, senior theater major, who played the role of Tyson.

Lang, freshman theater and psychology major, who played Jeremy, said he enjoyed the audience’s reaction to the jokes. Jost, the narrator, also enjoyed himself.

“It was a lot of fun,” Jost said.

Warner said the piece was meant to work in a variety of production styles.

“We wrote it in mind for someone to be able to do this instantly, as well as doing it with all the technical stuff,” Warner said.

Warner and Jensen plan to turn the play into a more technical piece later on.

“We would love to take this to theaters and other schools,” Jensen said. “We hope for good things in the future.”