Senior Frieda Bilezikian says she always knew she wanted to be a writer. 

“The minute I learned to read, I shut myself away when I was a kid — let me just read, read, read,” she says. “I spent so much time reading and then felt I wanted to write, too. They were terrible stories, but I was writing. When I got into old movies … just before my freshman year, I was obsessed. That’s when I started to say I don’t just want to write, I want to write for people to perform.” 

Frieda's first play, All This Talk About Murder, was performed in two shows on Friday, May 1, in the Black Box Theater. She wrote and directed the play as an independent study project. Seniors Sophie Singer, Natalie Pereira, and Nina Gitlitz, and juniors Blair Sontag and Joy Smith, all veterans of Loomis Chaffee productions, were in the cast. 

The play is set backstage in a theater in 1935. The character Jack is jealous of Cal, who plays the lead in all the productions and is the celebrity. Jack plans to kill Cal. Others find out, but no one knows exactly what each other knows. “There is a lot of secrecy and funny moments,” Frieda says. When the play ends, there is a crash and a scream, leaving the viewer to decide what happened. 

None of this might have happened if not for her experience last summer working at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Mass. The playhouse was founded in 1927, and she had toured the building with her mother and grandmother, the head of the theater taking them backstage, where they saw posters from as far back as the 1930s. “There were names I knew,’ Frieda says. “So I was saying, ‘Look, Mom, it’s Farley Granger. Look, mom, it’s Joan Fontaine.’ And the woman said, ‘How do you know those people?’” 

She knew them from watching all those old movies. That led to Frieda’s job last summer going through archival material as the theater readied for its 100th anniversary celebration. Going through playbills, she gained the inspiration for the genre of her play from famous playwright Nowel Coward, known for farcical comedies. And she discovered much more. A Betty Davis autograph. A Claudette Colbert autograph. A handwritten letter from the British actress Gertrude Lawrence. 

Frieda says she started writing the play last July, working on it sporadically in the summer. She submitted the play as part of her portfolio for the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She will attend the school next year and plans to major in dramatic writing, which trains students in writing for theater, television, and film. Frieda says she came back to working on her play in January. The culmination: the shows in the Black Box Theater. 

“We had a big audience for each show,” Fried says. “It went really well.” 

Frieda was on stage for the first time at Loomis this winter, when she had a role in a production of Darcy and Elizabeth. At the time, she said she felt that she needed to experience a script from the acting side to become a better writer. 

“That was as far as my theater experience went,” Frieda says, “so it was nice to have seasoned people involved. I learned so much from them, and they could not have been nicer.”  

She also learned much about not only writing but directing a play. 

“One thing you don’t think about when writing is communicating your vision,” she says. “It’s in your head, and I spent so much time writing this play and could see in my mind exactly how I wanted it to go. I knew how each character acted. I knew everything. The whole play would happen in my head, but when it came to telling [the actors] about it, I realized it was much trickier than you think to say something that is obvious to you, but they don’t know what I am thinking. That was my biggest takeaway — how to communicate and make definitive choices [as the director].” 

Now she will head to college with a play on her resume. Add that to her English Department honors, work in the Writing Studio, and Loomis writing awards. 

“If you told me at the beginning of my freshman yar that I would have done this at the end of my senior year, I would not have believed you,” Frieda says.  

But a lot has changed. “Loomis Chaffee and some wonderful teachers, especially in the humanities, have helped me to speak up, share my ideas, and to have confidence in my writing. And to do things that scare me,” she says. “The whole theater department has been wonderful to me this whole year because I also decided to take Acting I. The support I have gotten from Mr. [David] McCamish [theater director] and all the people in theater who are so experienced — they just welcomed me in.”