Four one-act comedies by Kansas University students will duke it out during English Alternative Theatre’s annual Final Four competition.

Thursday night, Charis Gallagher’s “Sugar Rush” will be pitted against Brendon O’Neill’s “In Human Years.” Friday night, Aisha Lindt’s “Kiko” will face off with Chris Flowers’ “Death by Natural Causes.” The winners of those two nights will vie for the championship Saturday night.

Playwrights in English Alternative Theatre's Final Four competition are, from left, Kansas University students Brendon O'Neill, Chris Flowers, Aisha Lindt and Charis Gallagher. The students' one-act plays will be presented Thursday through Saturday nights in Smith Hall.

The plays were written by students in last fall’s beginning playwriting class taught by KU English professor Paul Lim. They will be presented as staged readings at 8 p.m. in Smith Hall.

Gallagher, who is majoring in English with a creative writing emphasis, said “Sugar Rush” is about a girl who doesn’t like her boyfriend’s best buddy and conspires with another girl to drive the men apart. The girls plant drugs really powdered sugar and try to link them with the buddy, but their plot goes awry.

“It’s the first play I’ve written, ” she said. “I had the idea because my fiancad a friend I was not crazy about, but I didn’t take any revenge on him. I just sat down and typed out the crazy things the girls could do.”

Gallagher said she did about four rewrites on her play before it was ready for the staged reading.

O’Neill’s “In Human Years” also underwent a transformation in Lim’s playwriting class.

“It started out about a nuclear family and their participating in reality TV,” he said. “It ended up being about man trying to genetically breed people into being more docile human beings. The names stayed the same, but that’s about all.”

O’Neill is not a novice to playwriting. His “Death as Usual” was produced by Kansas City’s Gorilla Theatre.

“It’s in the same vein as ‘In Human Years.’ It’s dark absurd humor, about people with crazy intentions in real-life scenarios and how they go about getting what they want.”

O’Neill will be transferring after this semester to Columbia College in Chicago, where he will study playwriting and independent film.

Like Gallagher’s play, “Kiko” is loosely based on a real-life experience. The play takes place in the back of a Japanese restaurant and centers on two white waitresses, an Asian male waiter and a Latin American male chef.

“The male waiter is new and is having trouble fitting in,” said Lindt, who is majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing.

Lindt, who works at a Japanese restaurant, took the idea from her workplace and wrote about 15 pages for a script. With the help of Lim and fellow playwriting students, she explored and developed the plot.

“It’s a true experience (that) I took in a fictional direction,” she said.

Flowers said “Death by Natural Causes” is an absurd comedy about a family that goes on a camping trip.

“It centers around the grandmother and how the rest of the family is mean to her,” he said. “She becomes sick and the rest of the family doesn’t care, and the sickness escalates.”

Flowers, an English major studying creative writing, said the play also addresses how the elderly are treated with little respect in American society.