2015 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition

Congratulations to the winning playwrights of our 2015 National Playwriting Competition!

I AM SO SO SO LONELY OR THE OMEGLE PLAY by Philip Anastassiou, 19, Tenafly NJ

AMERICAN VENICE by Nick Apostolina, 17, Burbank, CA

WHY WE HAVE WINTER by ALEXA DERMAN, 19, Westfield, NJ

WHAT WE CALL OURSELVES AT NIGHT by Derick Edgren, 19, Fort Collins, CO

MAGGIE'S DINER by Frank Garland, 18, Seattle, WA

YOUNG MATA HARI: THE NOSY SCHOOLGIRL by Ben Hendel, 13, Brooklyn, NY

TOPSY THE ELEPHANT by Kate L. Jeffrey, 13, Brooklyn, NY

PHILIA by India Kotis, 18, Brooklyn, NY

STRANGE FRUIT by Emma Silverman, 18, New York, NY

Meet Emily Clark

Hometown: Wayne, PA

A journey started just about a year ago: eight young writers from around the country sent their plays to the 2014 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition. Those plays were distributed to our team of readers, who wrote an evaluation for each of them. They moved on to be rigorously discussed by two separate committees. Once selected as winners, those eight writers were paired with professional dramaturgs and directors to explore and develop their work. And now they’ve traveled across to country to join us!

We are thrilled to start the Young Playwrights Conference, where the playwrights will see Broadway and Off Broadway shows, meet with artists like David Henry Hwang and Sarah Ruhl, and ultimately rehearse and present their plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre!  You can reserve your tickets for the reading series here: http://www.youngplaywrights.org/attend-a-young-playwrights-inc-production/

And now for this year’s last installment of interviews with those eight wonderful writers.

Meet Emily Clark! Her play Road Runner is a poetic exploration of a mining town and those who pass through it, those who are trapped in it, and the mysterious hole growing larger at its center.
You’ve been submitting for at least two years now. How did you first hear about the competition?

I first heard about it through Philadelphia Young Playwrights. My teacher talked to me about submitting to the regional competition. Then, when I placed in that, the letter said ‘go ahead and submit to the (Young Playwrights Inc. National Competition).’ So I looked it up and I saw the website and I thought it was a great organization and competition. So I submitted last year and this year.

I like the people over at Philadelphia Young Playwrights – they’re really nice.

Yes, they are. And they have great criticism; I really appreciate when they write to you and critique. That was a big influence.

Your writing style is very compelling. Has there been an influence for your poetic, image-based writing style?

I really enjoy Gabriel García Márquez and his work with magical realism. My favorite book is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I love how you can have those very poetic images and beautiful, outlandish symbols – while also staying grounded in reality and adding to your own lifestyle. I think that’s one of the most fantastical and also beautiful ways to add both the unreal and the real together, by using those components to create a mix between the experience and what you want to experience.

So it’s somewhat of an expressionistic style. I can really see the real and the unreal inRoad Runner. It feels so gritty and so grounded in those characters’ economic and social reality, but then it’s so poetic with the hole growing in the middle of their community. Was there a particular inspiration for Road Runner?

Not really! I sort of just had this idea of people stuck in a place where they can’t move and they’re all just waiting for something to happen to them. And this young girl’s journey where she’s growing up and she doesn’t really know what she can do, she’s just stuck in this community that doesn’t go anywhere. And all of these symbols of trains and shoes and trying to get from one place to another. And it’s about her mental growth as well. And she keeps Danny, her brother, as one means of escaping this oppression, or she has to stay and grow up like the rest of them and be suffocated by this smoke that continues to grow around her. The town sort of represents hell. Then there’s Sly, who’s the gatekeeper of this town. She doesn’t see a way out unless she herself can move past her brother’s death and just say goodbye to everything she’s known and move forward.

It’s certainly moving when she really has to reconcile what that loss means to her. So you’ve been working on it the past few months. Has it been changing?

Yes, I find that rewriting is one of the hardest parts of writing in itself. But my dramaturg Emily Schwend has been really helpful. She told me a lot of really great criticism about fleshing out the characters’ motives, and also mentioning Danny earlier to create a more logical and more obvious manifestation of his loss. She also talked about the difficulties of writing stage directions and making them real as well as creating that imagery. So she’s been a great help to me. And I recently talked to my director Kim Kefgen on Friday about the play as well. And she really had some great creative input about finding and fleshing out the characters’ motivations. So I’m hoping to rewrite more, just to keep working on it.

You’ll definitely have an opportunity to do that at the Conference! Are you working on other writing projects at the moment?

I’m always trying to write new plays and work on some stories of some sort. I haven’t had a lot of time to write because it’s been the first year of college. But I was in this playwriting class where I got to be a reader, and I heard a lot of great ideas. It’s been interesting to hear other students’ work. I wrote a play a few months ago – a children’s work and it was interesting to try to tap into a younger audience while also creating a bridge to more adult themes.

I can see the kind of imagery you use being really compelling in children’s theater. Would you mind telling me what that one’s about?

Sure. I was trying to write about children’s literature; I incorporated it into this girl’s overall journey and how she tried to find herself. I was writing this for my school; they asked me to write a children’s play for the 5th grade. Which turned out not to really work out – it was too ambitious, they said. It tapped into different stories. I used Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Bridge to Terabithia, and The Jungle Book, and Owl and the Pussycat and all of this children’s literature, while also maintaining this one girl as she tries to find her sister through these different literary works and each one taught her a different lesson and she was moving forward to try to figure out her own place. It’s located in a time, in the 1920s, where there was the Women’s Movement, so she was looking to see if she wanted to take that normal woman’s role in society or find her own as a writer.

That sounds fascinating. Are you looking forward to the Conference?

I am definitely looking forward to the Conference. I can’t wait to meet all the playwrights and all the directors and everyone who has helped to make this happen. It’s been a real honor.

We’re honored to have you in the Conference!

Emily Clark is joining seven other playwrights at the Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15, 2015. We hope to see you at Cherry Lane Theatre 0n January 12th, 13th, and 14th for our 7pm readings!

Meet Alexa Derman

Hometown:  Westfield NJ

We’re just about a month away from our National Conference!  It’s hard to believe that this time last year, we were beginning to read through the work of hundreds of playwrights – eight of whom will be joining us on January 7.

Alexa Derman is one of those wonderful writers.  Her play About Art centers around the relationship between brothers Aaron and Brad, exploring creativity, loyalty, and complex family dynamics. 

I know that you were involved with Young Playwrights Inc. before the Competition…  

Totally!  My sophomore year of high school, I was in APW (the Advanced Playwriting Workshop).  It was the year that we were homeless because the office caught on fire.  I had applied because I had not gotten into my school play, and I wanted some way to fill the time. I think I applied with fiction; I had never written a play before.  I just saw Sondheim’s name and I was like, “Yay! This is cool!”  It was it my first time travelling into the city by myself — I’m from New Jersey — and I would hang out with these cool city kids.  It was a transformative experience.  It was really my first experience at all with playwriting and obviously it was incredible.  Because we were homeless we went to all sorts of fantastic locations all over New York every week, which was really exciting.  The kids were phenomenal.  I wrote a play – it was this really horrible, 50-page monstrosity that I haven’t really touched since – but I wrote it.  And the staged readings – I just remember walking into the room and one of the actors was my character and just freaked out.   I loved the entire thing but the readings in particular, I was like, “This. More of this.  This needs to keep happening.”  And I remember that year, going onto the website and reading these interviews and being like “Wow!  Those people! Wow!”  So that’s making this exciting… it was just a wonderful experience.

Well that’s great!  I didn’t realize you hadn’t written plays before APW.    So, you submitted more than just About Art.  What led you to that period of productivity? 

Two of them that I submitted were on commission.  I was writing them for people I knew.  WithAbout Art, my friends were doing a one-act themed night, and my friends asked me to write something for them.  It was not allowed in the festival because it was deemed not family-friendly.  They were like, “It’s too dark.” And I was like, “You don’t even know!” Because at the same time I was working on that play about crack addiction.   The reason I was so productive was because I was working on deadlines for specific people, which was actually a really great experience because it just forced me to get out there.  It was the beginning of senior year and it was a way to relieve stress from the college application process.  So even though I had less time than ever, I felt like I was writing the things I needed to.

Something I’ve noticed about your writing is it seems like you’re trying to empathize with a wide range of people.  You’re trying to explore very different lives in your different plays.  So I was curious about where the inspiration for this particular play came from. 

The context in which I wrote this play was I had promised my friends I would send it to them and I was on an airplane and I had thirty minutes left before the flight landed – I had to email it!  A lot of my plays start out as ideological arguments, so I think this one was similar.  I wanted to unpack the tortured artist trope.  Then they became people instead of an argument I was having with myself.   I don’t write a lot of men in my plays so this was a particularly interesting experience that I really enjoyed.  The thoughts about art that had been in the back of my head and then the need to finish this play in the next thirty minutes made it happen.

You mentioned you don’t write a lot of men and you wanted to stretch your writing.  I think it’s a really mature thing to do as an artist:  recognize your habits and then challenge them.  When I read the play, I thought ‘My buddy Sam has to be a dramaturg on this,’ because I knew he would respond to the brother relationship.  Could you tell me a little bit about working with Sam?

He’s absolutely incredible.  He’s really interested in focusing on places in the play where he thinks there could be more resistance – where someone gives in too quickly to an argument, and identifying those spots where it could explode out.  And I think that’s really what I need with this one.  It was a 6-page submission – which is fine – but I would like to get it to at least 10 minutes and I have just by looking at all of those moments where there could be so much more tension.  He’s really, really helpful with those big-picture, character-driven moments.  Also he sends me emails with the subject line ‘About About Art,’ which is just hilarious.

That is really funny.  So, has your perspective on the play been changing?

I think when I submitted it, the characters were a little bit type-y.  The reason the characters’ names are Aaron and Brad is because I write all my characters in the form of A and B and I have to add the names last minute.  I think Brad was very much like ‘perfect family, blah blah blah…’ Like I think I said he worked on Wall Street.  It was very typical.  I think since I’ve been working on it, I’ve really delved into their personal histories, so they still kind of represent these different ideologies, but I think they’re definitely more specific, developed people with a real, specific, developed, background.   The kind of revision I like is adding, so this has been really fun.

Have you been working on other pieces of writing at the same time? 

I’m kind of in this weird place right now.  Because you know how there’s always such a gap between first you write it, then you hear back about it, then you’re doing it.  There’s a lot of big time spots.  So I’m working on a lot of new stuff now at school.  My thing was always really fast arguments so I’ve been writing a lot of monologues recently.  Zoe’s theatre company is doing one of my plays in the spring.  It’s a one woman show.  She’s directing it.  I‘m excited to see it.  They had readings like a month and a half ago so I’m still in revisions.  I’m working on new stuff, in revisions for old stuff, and in revisions for this play, too.  I’m kind of jumping all over the place.

You were telling me a bit about the course load you had right now, which sounded fascinating. 

So I’m planning on double-majoring in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  I’m really interested in feminist literary theory.  I’m filling requirements, which is fine – I’m taking a lot of intro classes, which is fine.  I think what’s emancipating the classes from like ‘meh’ material occasionally is that the people here are really phenomenal.  Right now I’m desperately trying to claw my way into a 400 level class that Sarah Ruhl is teaching next semester despite the fact that I’m a freshman.  The theater community is really big here so I’m spending a lot of time there.  I mean, nine or ten student-written shows are going up next semester so that’s cool.

Is there anything else you want to say about your play or about your writing process?

I had an epiphany last night: I realized that so much of my plays are about people picking apart each other’s language and just about the vocabulary that people use.  I think a lot of people think that if you’re interested in English, you’re either an academic or a writer and there’s no overlap.  I thought that myself for a while too: that those were two different hemispheres in my life.  But I think I’m starting to realize that interest in analysis manifests itself in my plays, and the way my characters go through things and argue manifests itself in my essays.   There’s this ideology that art and creative writing and things like that exist in a vacuum of like, “Okay, here, go to your elective.”   I really think that… there’s not such a strong divide between art and academics and they can bleed into each other in a really cool way.

Are there playwrights who inspire you, who blend those two worlds?

First of all, I love is when I get my Young Playwrights Inc.  evaluations and they recommend plays by people that I really like, plays that I really like.  I think a perfect example is Mary Zimmerman’sMetamorphoses, which is one of my favorite plays.  I was talking about Sarah Ruhl – Eurydice.  They’re like emancipating classics and bringing them into art.  Suzan-Lori Parks is one of my favorite playwrights ever.  She pays so much attention to language.  She’s a role model.

We’re looking forward to having you at conference and working on this play.

Thanks!  I’m really excited.  I used to think, “Oh, I wrote one good play.”  Now I realize that’s not true.  I need to work on this strange little play.  It makes me want to take every single random idea I have on my computer and comb back through all that work.

Alexa Derman will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15. We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Maddie Lobdell

Hometown: Deposit, New York

We’re less than a month away from welcoming the winners of the National Playwriting Competition to NYC for the Young Playwrights Conference!

This week, we’re introducing you to Maddie Lobdell. Her play, Ms. Mayfield’s Aquarium, is a subtle, complex portrait of friendship as three teenagers spend the summer navigating difficult family situations and forming a bond with a lonely man.

How did you start writing plays?

I wasn’t into theater that much, but a couple years ago I really fell in love with musical theater, and for a couple of years I thought I wanted to direct. When I was younger I really loved writing as well. So one night I just sat down and started writing and that was that, I guess.

Was Ms. Mayfield’s Aquarium something that happened spontaneously or was it inspired by something in particular?

I think it was pretty spontaneous. But for a while I thought about writing something based on two of my cousins, who are also two of my best friends. When I started writing this, I realized I wanted a lot of these characters to be like them – I wanted it to be like their lives if they had different experiences and didn’t have the good things they have now – but to have the same personalities as them.

It’s a very empathetic play; it’s really big-hearted toward all of its characters. Has the play been changing at all since you sent it to us?

Yeah. After I sent it in, I realized my format wasn’t really that great, so I worked on that a lot. I added a little bit more of the characters’ parents, and a little bit more what happens at the very end and how it wraps up.

Did you find yourself connecting more to the younger characters than you did to the parents?

Yeah, I did, definitely.

It’s good to recognize that and work on it! Is that something you’ve been talking to your dramaturg, Rachel Bonds, about?

Yeah. It was really cool talking to her because she told me that she could not write like me when she was fifteen which is crazy because I haven’t written anything else before. And she mentioned that: that I might want to put a little bit more in with the parents. So, I worked on that because I really wanted to make sure they were a part of it somehow. I’m excited about writing more about the parents, because I kind of made the parents look like really bad people, I think, and I didn’t really want them to seem like that. So I’m excited to make them seem like they have reasons for the way they’re acting. I’m excited to make them look like better people. I don’t think I write bad characters. I write troubled characters because I want them to be real. I want each character to have flaws and strengths.

I don’t think they come across as bad people. I think they come across as troubled, and flawed, definitely, but it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to make them villains or anything like that. So, are there any writers that are inspiring to you?

What really inspired me was: my sister and I had been watching all of the films of Wes Anderson. We had watched one called The Life Aquatic. And right after we finished watching it, I said ‘I have to write.’ I don’t know what that movie did but it made me realize that I had to write. I think I took a lot of inspiration from those movies and they made me realize that this is how I want to write and this is how I want my characters to be.

Who are some of your other favorite filmmakers?

Right now I am very interested in the Coen brothers. I love the darker sense of humor in what they do. I’m also influenced by comedy writers. For a long time I have admired female comedy writers like Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. They create very funny, relatable female characters and I try to do that.

Are you looking forward to the Conference?

Yeah, I can’t wait. I’m really excited to see how it goes, and I look to learn a lot from it, because I don’t know a lot now about putting on a play. So I’m really excited about that.

We are too!

Maddie Lobdell will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15. We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Sierra Blanco

Hometown: New York, NY

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! December is here and that means we’re getting closer to welcoming eight wonderful writers to our National Conference. This week in our interview series, we’re introducing you to Sierra Blanco, who will be joining us next month!

Sierra’s play The Drill is a harrowing account of an elementary teacher’s attempt to keep her students calm throughout a lockdown drill… that may be more than just practice.

I thought I would start by asking how you started writing plays?

Well, I started because I had this acting teacher and every week she had us write monologues. That was the first year I had her and the next year we did dialogues. And I wrote this play that year called Too Many Rules, and I entered it in the David Letterman Worldwide Play Festival… and it did not win! And then the next year, driven by that failure, I decided that I was going to write a musical. So I wrote a musical called After I Caped Myself in Red. I did win and it got produced Off-Broadway with a couple of other plays. And then the next year I wrote The Drill and entered it in that contest; it won first place as Best Dramatic Play. And then I thought ‘what the heck’ and entered it in (Young Playwrights Inc.’s) NYC division… and won! Then I entered it (for this competition)… and here I am!

And here we are! So tell me a little bit about how The Drill came to be.

I first got the idea in a lockdown drill. I was having the drill and no one was being quiet. Everyone was like nudging each other and like doing noises and messing around. And my first thought was ‘they shouldn’t be doing that,’ and my second thought was ‘I wonder if there was a reason. I wonder if it would make a good play if there was a reason for the kids not to be quiet in a lockdown drill.’ And thus basically the idea was born!

Great!  Can you tell me a little bit about your conversation with Morgan Jenness?  I know she was really excited.  

Well, I was too!  It was nice.  She had some great insights.  She recommended a couple of movies that she thought would inspire me a little bit.  One of them was The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock.  It was fun!  We both agreed that some of the things I would do would most likely come out of just seeing it because a lot of things look and seem different when there are people doing them than anything else.

And it’s such a physical play.  It’s so much about being in the small space and how that affects people physically.  Has the play been changing at all?  

Yes it has!  

In what ways? 

Mainly, I’ve just been trying out different things and certain suggestions, and seeing if a character did the tiniest different thing, would it affect the whole play or would it  affect just them.

And I know you’ve been writing other plays.  Can you tell me what you’ve been working on since The Drill? 

When I got the news that The Drill was a Finalist, I was already in the middle of writing another play called Slumber, which is about basically a bunch of kids… it’s sort of a reincarnation thing.

Who’s reincarnated? 

Well there’s sort of two parts.  There’s a bunch of girls at a sleepover, chatting.  And there’s a bunch of boys.  And it’s both of their birthdays.  And the girl is the reincarnated form of one of the boys.

Oh wow.  I’m looking forward to reading it.  So you mentioned before that you’d been acting in school.  What have you been working on in terms of acting?  

I recently did a play at BAM, in French, Six Characters in Search of an Author.  Which I learned in French.  I learned French over like three months, somehow.  It was awesome.  It’s cool to be in a play and see people showing things one way that seemed differently on the page.

What are you working on next?  

I am writing a new musical.  It is called We Have a Winner.  It’s about an underage girl who wins the lottery and two incredibly dumb criminals who try to extort the money from her.

Sounds like a really funny story!  Are you looking forward to Conference?  

Yes!  Definitely!

What are you most excited about? 

I’m really excited about meeting all these people behind all these amazing stories.  Also, just meeting my fellow playwrights!

We tend to get most excited about letting the writers become a team together.  So we’re looking forward to that too!  

Sierra Blanco will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15. We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Eliana Pipes

Hometown: Altadena, California

The holiday music has started streaming in through the windows here at Young Playwrights Inc. headquarters, and that means we’re getting closer to the Young Playwrights Conference.

This week we are introducing you to Eliana Pipes, one of the writers who will be joining us in January. Her play Snow Gray is an irreverent spin on a fairy tale, centered around a young woman of mixed ethnic heritage contending with the ‘Seven Dwarves’ on either side of her legacy.

You submitted several plays to this competition and they’re in a range of styles, from realistic to expressionistic and more. I wanted to ask how you began writing in such a range?

One of the funny things about how I came to writing is that it happened one hundred percent through acting. I’ve never had a structured playwriting class before, really. I did one summer program but that summer program was all about breaking structure! So as a result, most of what I do is really exploratory and I’m just trying to latch onto what a style is. I don’t really know what my aesthetic or voice as a writer is yet – so that’s part of what I’m looking to find.

What, so far, is the aesthetic that has been the most accessible for you?

I do a lot of single-scene family dramas. A lot of around-the-table things. I realized I’ve never written scenes before – just one sustained, slow-burn thing. So definitely family dynamics are something I’ve thought a lot about.

I think there are family dynamics in Snow Gray; they’re a different kind of family, and there’s a family legacy in the background of the play. What was the inspiration for that play?

That one… oh gosh! I was in a history class and my teacher just casually mentioned this side note that interracial marriage was illegal on the books until 1978 – he’s actually wrong about that, it was 1969, I googled it because it got me really mad! – but just having that in my head just made me really upset because both of my parents were alive during that timespan. So, thinking about everything they must have been inundated with growing up, and realizing how having an identity that sort of transverses two planes that are historical opposites makes you battle history as you go through the world. So just thinking about the historical forces pushing… I just got really angry and came home and I wrote that play!

Anger can be a place to start from, definitely. And I feel like you’ve moved through anger though.

I’m happy about that!

How has the play been changing since you’ve sent it to us?

Definitely more character development. I think it’s gotten deeper. Which I’m really happy about. And I it’s more about the human aspect than how they serve as symbols. I think, before, it was a lot of interaction between them as ideas and not really them as people. So I think it’s moving toward them as people. I hope!

I think your team of actors is going to have a field day working on this! It’s really exciting. So, you told me through email a pretty awesome coincidence: your dramaturg, Marcus Gardley is actually someone you’ve worked with on this play before this process.

Yeah! I did a six-week young playwrights workshop at Brown University last summer actually. It was the first time they ever did the program, it was like the big pilot program. And we had classes and there were Master Teachers and Marcus was one of the Master Teachers. His play The Gospel of Lovingkindness was going up at Trinity Rep at the time, so we all got to see his play and then we got to meet him, and of course after we saw it we were just so entranced. It was amazing work. And so he just did this one little Master Class – and he actually mentioned this competition, he mentioned Young Playwrights Inc. And I took a note and then I flipped through my notebook, and that was why I applied. So much of it is due to Marcus! Also his play was really bold and also tackled racial themes and showed an example of the kind of work I wanted to do. And now, it’s him! It’s crazy!

What’s it been like having him as your dramaturg?

Really exciting. He has really insightful questions. It’s a little intimidating sometimes! But he’s great!

Great! So you mentioned before the interview that you’ve been acting. Can you tell me a bit about what you’ve been up to since you moved to New York City?

I’m involved with Columbia University Players – C.U.P. – in a production of Twelve Angry Men. I joined an improv troupe, Fruit Paunch. And I’m just doing a lot of exploring. I’m really trying to get into the city and see more theater. It’s harder than I thought! But I’m just connecting with the city as much as I can.

What have you seen that has inspired you? Not just in New York City…

Back in Los Angeles I was really involved with Center Theatre Group – CTG. They did a lot of outreach programs to my school in particular, and that’s part of the reason I really got involved with art. There are three big foundations that I credit with my involvement in the art world, and they’re one of them. So a lot of what’s gone up there. And Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz was huge! Tribes by Nina Raine – which was mentioned in one of my feedback things*; it made me so happy! Those shows meant a lot.
(*Note: Young Playwrights Inc.’s readers send every submitting playwright a detailed letter of feedback for each play.)

Are there any other theatrical influences you’ve had? Any other inspirations?

Oh, so many! I did the August Wilson Monologue Competition in high-school and that was a really big “Okay fine I’ll admit it, I want to do theatre” moment! And as a result August Wilson’s work has been really important to me – definitely in my development as an actress but also to me as a theater artist and a playwright. Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive changed the game! Completely changed the game for me.

For a lot of us! Anything else you want to let us know about your play or about your process as a writer?

I think this is the first play I’ve ever written that’s been sort of therapeutic… which I hesitate to say. I’m a really firm believer in the way that writing is an outlet for young people. I think it’s really essential for young people to have a way to express themselves through writing because so much of the youth experience is characterized by feeling voiceless. And having an outlet, whether it’s poetry or playwriting or what have you – it’s such an important way to empower people.

Young Playwrights Inc. agrees with you!

Eliana Pipes will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15. We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd. 

Meet Spencer Slovic

Hometown: Portland, Oregon

It’s the third week of our interview series with the 2014 National Playwriting Competition winners!

This week, we’re introducing you to Spencer Slovic, whose play The Resurrectionistexplores grief and memory as a gifted scientist programs a robot to have his deceased son’s personality – though the authenticity of that personality is uncertain.

I want to start by asking you how you heard about the Competition? What led you to submit your play to us?

Well, I was in a playwriting class the first semester of my senior year of high school. The class consisted of writing a one act. We had written short scenes before. Our teacher basically recommended for everyone who was interested and whose plays were far along enough to submit to the competition. A few years before, four to five years ago actually, one of the students had won it so he kept on encouraging people to send their plays in.

What was the process of writing The Resurrectionist like? What did you go through to get to this play?

I had never written plays before the class. I had read plays before but I wasn’t in the theater community or anything. So, we read some plays, some one-acts and short scenes. We wrote a monologue. We wrote some comedic scenes. We started with a two-person scene then added a third person to make a three-person scene. Just reading and writing lots of different types of plays not in any particular genre. And then, halfway through the semester we transitioned into writing the one-acts we came up with. We wrote the first scene and workshopped those in class. We workshopped all the scenes we did. We acted them out. We improve-ed. It was really a hands-on class which I liked a lot. We acted out most of the things we wrote. Through that, the last month or so, we were just writing our one-acts. I had just finished the first draft when I sent it in to Young Playwrights Inc. By the time the class was over, I had a different draft altogether.

What really attracted us to it and what’s excited the folks who’ve come across it so far is that it’s an interesting blend of a sci-fi concept but also a kind of timeless, human dilemma. At its heart, I feel like it’s really about grief. Was there a particular idea or genre you were going for? What inspired you to write this story?

Originally I was envisioning more of a sci-fi type of play. I was thinking about setting it in space, like on a moon base or something. My original idea was for Brendan to be zombie, like an actual human who somehow came back to life. Somehow that all evolved to have a little more realism. It’s still futuristic though and it’s not really feasible in real life. I think it’s more similar to magical realism now than flat-out fantasy. I wasn’t trying to go for any particular type of genre. I was just trying to find a story that was worth telling and then write it however it came out. I wasn’t thinking about genre when I was writing it.

I think it is a story worth telling. I find it really relatable, what goes on in the family. Is there an aspect of the play you’re thinking of working on once you get to conference?

I’m not sure exactly. When I was talking with my dramaturg Max [Posner], his main suggestion was to give the characters a little more unique personality if I wanted to. To give them their quirks, to establish more of their relationships to each other. I’m interested in seeing at the Conference what I can do with just the character work, which I didn’t go into too much when I wrote the first draft of it.

You mentioned Max Posner, who is actually an alum of the National Conference. What’s the process been like working with him?

It’s been good. We’ve only talked once on the phone but it was a really productive, fun conversation. We talked about, again the character work, like how the characters interact with each other. Like the relationship between Al and Leslie I didn’t really flesh out other than their one central conflict in the play. He gave lots of suggestions of what else I could include without making it longer or changing the whole story. This way I could give the characters just a little more detail and depth.

I hear ya. I’m currently in the middle of a rewrite myself and I think about that every day! You mentioned you read a bunch of plays in your playwriting class. Are there any plays or playwrights that you felt particularly inspired by or just liked a lot?

One of my favorite one acts is Kobo Abe’s The Man Who Turned into a Stick. Just something about that. It’s not so much about the story itself but the ideas that come out of it. We also readNo Exit… which showed me the medium of playwriting as more of a dialogue based thing. I’m more used to working with film and screenwriting, which is a lot more visual. Originally when I was thinking of ideas for a one act, they were all more visually based, like what I wanted to happen, what I wanted people to see happening on the stage. The dialogue—once we started riffing with that a lot with that in class—that added another dimension to filmmaking too. But it got me thinking of a different aspect of story that I hadn’t thought about as much before.

Are you working on any films right now?

Yeah, I’m in a few different film clubs here at Stanford. I’m writing a few short films here on my own that I might want to produce. I’ve made a bunch of short films and stuff in the past and some other screenplays, like longer feature-length screenplays.

Would you mind telling me what any of those projects are about?

So the longer, feature-length screenplay that I’m writing, I only have a third of it so far. It’s about a man who lives on his own out in the desert in a self-sustaining, self-sufficient house. He grows his own food. He basically lives there alone. Once a week, a truck brings some necessities for him. It’s about him living there and one day a woman shows up at his door, sort of dehydrated in the middle of the desert, and he has to take care of her.

That’s a compelling idea. You mentioned the difference between visual writing and dialogue-based writing. I can totally see that story working through visuals. You don’t need a lot of language to show that character’s situation. That sounds really great and exciting. Is there anything else you want to say about The Resurrectionist or the process?

I’m still working on the play. I want to develop it more into maybe something longer. I’m not sure if I want that to be in the play format or transition it into something more screenplay. When I think about how to add more to it, how make it more…how to add more to the story, I’m thinking more visually. If I continue working on it, it will be interesting to see what direction it will be.

Regardless if it becomes a stage play or a screenplay, I hope the exercises you get to do at Conference will help you towards that!

Spencer Slovic will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15. We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd.

Meet May Treuhaft-Ali

Hometown: Jackson Heights, New York

It’s the second installment of our annual interview series with the winners of our National Playwriting Competition, who will be joining us in January for the Young Playwrights Conference. 

This week, we’re introducing you to May Treuhaft-Ali – or, re-introducing you to her, as this is her second time as a National Competition winner!  Her play Naked Fat Man is the imaginative, poignant story of The Man, a sculpture who dreams of being a true piece of art, who struggles with identity, gender, love, and fantasy.  (Please note that May uses the gender neutral pronouns “zhe” and “hir” when describing The Man).

You’re a second time winner of the Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition.  No small feat!  I was wondering what you took away from last year’s Conference?

First of all:  Working with the other writers.  So, so, so important to everything for me.  There were so many moments where I was like “Oh, these are my people. Oh, they get it.”  I’d never really been able to talk about certain things in my writing process and all of a sudden people were just saying things and I was like “Wait! I feel that way too!”  And just sitting up ‘til 4am writing together, playing the What-If game. We would all send each other work.  Every single person took playwriting really seriously… to have a group of people for whom playwriting was like a matter of life or death – that was really exciting.

Something happened to me in March.  I was at the New Dramatists’ reading room, which I discovered during the Conference last year.  And it’s one of my favorite places in the entire world.  Every single time I am back in the city from college, I go there.  So, I was there and I was reading plays.  I was reading a Lucas Hnath play, and then Lucas Hnath walked in!  He had given a master class at Young Playwrights Inc.  So I went up to him and I was like “Oh, I’m reading your play!” And he remembered me and it was really cool.  Then a little later, one of the interns came in and she had been at the Industry Meet-and-Greet, and she started talking to me and she was really nice.  And then Piper Rasmussen, who was a participant in the Conference last year, walked in and I hadn’t seen her in a while and we talked a little bit.  And then Christina Anderson – who was involved in Young Playwrights and was a playwriting professor at Wesleyan last semester – she walked in!  And I was just like “There are so many people I know through Young Playwrights Inc.”  So feeling really immersed in this little world of New York playwrights is something I have really valued.  It makes the playwriting world a lot smaller, which then makes me think that I might not be crazy if I want to be part of that world in a few years.

I think you already part of the world!  I was wondering how you’ve grown or changed as a writer since you were at the Conference.

I was actually just thinking about this.  You said something to me which is possibly the nicest thing anyone has said when you called me about Naked Fat Man back in June and you said I wrote about what I was afraid of.  I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between my writing and my fears.  I think I am lot more willing to embrace my fears in my writing.  I don’t think that’s a conscious choice because I just start writing about something and then all of a sudden it turns into my deepest, darkest fears.  Or one of my friends reads it or my sister reads it and they’re like “oh my gosh, you just wrote about all these things that you’re terrified about.”  And I’m like “Oh I did?  I just thought it was like a funny little scene.”  These things just find their way onto the page in a way that feels like I almost have no control over it.   In the playwriting class that I’m taking right now, a lot of times I think “why I am writing these things? Why am I letting my classmates who know me in real life read this stuff? Why am I saying these really personal, really vulnerable things?”  It’s not something I’m choosing to do.  It just comes out.  Playwriting is where that part of me can come out.  And when it can come out, it just overflows.

I think a lot of really good art comes from a play between the unconscious and the conscious.  You have to listen to your unconscious but then you have to consciously craft it.  In embracing vulnerability and embracing your fears, what led you to writing Naked Fat Man?

Something I’ve realized about each play that I write is that it’s really, really representative of the time at which I wrote it.  Even if it’s not about real events that happened in that time, it’s representative of everything I had been thinking about.    So, I wrote this play over the course of my freshman year at college.  And I was thinking a lot about how I was in this new place with new people, and this idea of:  you can never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head.  You can never really know where someone else is coming from.  You can be really close with them.  You can spend a ton of time with them.  Maybe you know a lot of their deep, dark secrets.  But there is some other part of them that you had no idea existed.  I would have a relationship with someone and someone else would say, “oh, that person is very cold and distant,” and I would say, “oh, that’s not my experience.”  Or I’d have a very funny relationship with someone and someone else would say, “oh, that person is so serious and always has deep heart-to-hearts with me.” And I would be like, “oh, that’s different.”  There are all these hidden sides and hidden stories.

You know, when you’re riding on a subway train with people.  Can you intuit those stories and those feelings?  When you do that, are you just making it up and putting your own life and your own thoughts into someone else?  The scary thing about empathizing with people, for me, is that I never know if I’m really understanding what’s going on with them or if I’m putting my own feelings into an experience that’s not my own.

I think that’s the scary thing about playwriting, too.  When I’m writing a scene about something that I haven’t personally experience and I try to relate to it, am I really understand this other experience or am I just twisting it to make it more familiar to myself?

Who do you think the character is in Naked Fat Man who most closely experiences what you’re describing?

The Man does this thing.  Zhe will create stories in hir head about other people and about what’s going on in their lives.  One of my favorite moments is when a woman gives a dollar to a violinist playing in the station and The Man says “they’re in love.”  And zhe gives this whole monologue about the R Train.  The Man says “I know it.  I can tell by the way her forehead wrinkles.”  And that’s totally something I do, and I don’t know if that’s me taking an interest in other people or if that’s me just being completely self-absorbed.

Also, May (a character in the play)… there’s this violinist in her life and she connects with him in this really beautiful way and they talk about all these great things like music and Joyce and great stuff.  And then she never sees him again and she doesn’t know why.  Meanwhile there are some basic things about The Man and about Mommy that she just doesn’t understand and she spends a ton of time with them.  She lives with them.  She just can’t sense what they’re feeling.

It’s interesting that so much of your thought process around this is about other people’s feelings when there is a character that is somewhat a representation of yourself.  Can you talk a bit about what the process has been like having a character named May Treuhaft-Ali in the play, then changing that to Lucy, then changing it back to May?

In terms of how sometimes I just do scary things in plays and I don’t know why I do them but I just do, that’s definitely what the character May Treuhaft-Ali was. I just did it and I didn’t know why I was doing it but that’s how I originally wrote the play and she just couldn’t have any other name.

I think in a lot of ways, I’m so, so jealous of the May Treuhaft-Ali character.  And I’m so, so terrified of her.  She has the life that I want in a lot of ways.  She is a successful playwright in New York City.  That would be the dream for me.  But the part where it felt truest that her name was May Treuhaft-Ali is when she moves and she leaves The Man and Mommy.  Something I’m always really scared of is that  because I’m pursuing my own creative endeavors, I am not there for my loved ones when they need me.  I know that I have a tendency when I get really involved in a theatre project or writing something, I just say that takes priority and everything else in my life has to wait. And sometimes, people can’t wait.  Like that’s not actually a good way to live because I do theater to bring me closer to other people and I don’t want it to be something that isolates me from the people I love most and keeps me from being a really good friend and family member to them.

Putting your art before everything else is something I’ve romanticized so much but it’s also something I’m really terrified of.

If you’re able to articulate that dilemma, you’re on a good road to being able to confront it as you get more and more into the professional world.  Speaking of the professional world!  I wanted to ask how the process is going with your dramaturg, Michael Walkup?

One thing that’s really cool about Michael’s suggestions is that he had me play with the graffiti artists, which has been really fun.  He said to me “What if the graffiti artists do have some artistic intent? What if they’re not just bad people?”  I don’t think graffiti artists are bad people and I don’t think graffiti isn’t art!  I like that subversive, playful art.  So, realizing that I’m kind of demonizing graffiti artists and that’s not actually congruent with my idea of art and public art – that’s been fun to play with.

We’ve been working on the character of The Man and going through one monologue to the next, tracking The Man’s growing consciousness from a piece of clay to a fully grown adult.  Which is exciting because, in the jump back and forth in this play, I sort of dabble in this childlike language for The Man sometimes, and then The Man gradually learns more about hir own identity and beliefs and taste in literature and stuff like that.  Playing with that has been fun.

The Man is a fascinating character and such a great stage presence.  So, are you working on anything before you join us for Conference?

I’m taking a class called Contemporary Plays: Reading and Writing with Quiara Alegría Hudes and it’s like the best thing ever and I leave class every day with my mind exploding.  I’m reading a ton of plays this semester which is really great.  Like I’m reading all of the plays that I secretly, without my knowing it, have been trying to write.

Like what?

I had read Angels in America before but I reread it for this class and I was like “Oh, every single play I write couldn’t have happened without Angels in America. Oh.”

I recently wrote a short play about a woman who pays actors to dramatize and stage all of her deepest pathological fears, which was really fun to write and also really terrifying.  This thing happened where I wasn’t really using my own pathological fears, I ended up writing about my fears anyway.

It sounds like your creative well is unlimited!  You have such a range of styles and content.  Before we wrap up, is there anything you want to say about the play?

The one thing that is really groundbreaking about this play for me about this play is that I always write plays about artists; I’m always obsessed with the question of what an artist’s role is in society and what art does.  And I think this is the first time my artists have been really shitty people.  And they do things like do commissions for money and sell out and have writer’s block and abandon their loved ones for the sake of personal advancement.  And it was just very interesting for me to realize that this was the first time I hadn’t idealized and romanticized the artists, and wondering what had changed in me.  I think that this play is one of my most art-affirming plays – somehow that happened because of or despite the artists being horrible people with problems.

I feel like you’re being hard on them!  They don’t come across to me as horrible people.  I think you’re reaching a level of complexity and nuance and contradiction within the characters – which all feels honest.  Anyway, it was really good to talk to you again, May!

You too!

May Treuhaft-Ali will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15. We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Zoe Kamil

Hometown: San Francisco, CA

The leaves are changing colors here in New York City, and it’s the time of year in which we introduce you to our National Competition Winners!  Our Literary Manager, Nick Gandiello, will conduct interviews with each of these wonderful writers, which we will present as we get closer to welcoming them to the 2015 National Conference.  There, they will network with working playwrights and representatives of New York’s top play development organizations, see Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, and rehearse and present their plays with theater professionals at an Off-Broadway theater.

First in this series is Zoe Kamil, whose play We Go Together explores desire and sexual identity as a teenager tries to vicariously fix her friend’s relationship problems – only to become a part of them. 

I wanted to start by asking you about your history with Young Playwrights Inc.  You’ve been involved with YPI before the National Competition so I was wondering if you could describe that experience?

First of all, my sophomore year of high school I took a playwriting class at school – I had done theater my entire life up until then, like the acting side – and I found that I really loved it.  And my mother and I did some research and we found Young Playwrights Inc., and found the Urban Retreat program, which is over the summer, nine days of playwriting workshops and experiencing theatre in New York and learning about playwriting here.  I applied and I got in, and I have to say that it was probably the most transformative nine days of my life so far.  I think it was just getting to be surrounded constantly during that period with people who were interested in the same things as me.  Like at that age, being fifteen, that was not something I was getting anywhere else.  Also through Urban Retreat, I met my best friend Miranda Cornell. We immediately clicked artistically and have since founded a theater company together – Semicolon Theatre Company. We self-produced 2 plays Off-Off Broadway this past March, and we’ll be producing again in early June. Actually, we’re mounting a wonderful piece by another of the National Competition winners, Alexa Derman! So that’s, like a specific door that YPI opened for me. 

Great!  So, what was the inspiration for We Go Together? 

It is probably the closest thing to an autobiographical play that I’ve written so far.  It’s not a situation that I’ve been in exactly, but I wrote it at a time during my high school experience where I was just starting to learn how to loosen my grip in friendships and relationships – realizing that the humans beings are complicated and fiercely imperfect and usually impossible to control no matter how much you love them.

You capture how confusing one’s own emotions can be; there’s a great complexity and ambiguity in what the characters feel about each other and about themselves.  Was that something you set out to do or did you just happen upon that while you were writing it? 

I don’t know if I was conscious of expressing that through my writing, but I was conscious of the fact that that was happening to me.  I don’t know if that makes sense, but I guess that’s why it came through in my writing, and I’m glad it did come through, because that’s what I was feeling.

I’m glad it came through too – it’s a really great play!  So, you’ve been working with a good friend of Young Playwrights Inc., Alice Pencavel, as your dramaturg. I was curious if you can tell me what that process has been like for you. 

Well, we’ve met once so far and I think she’s fantastic. From the very beginning she was like “I have very specific ideas and I want to express them to you but I also want you to know that of course this your play and it’s your creation and as a dramaturg my role is to support it.”  I’ve worked with dramaturgs before who are either not expressive enough of what they think or too expressive or too pushy, and I think she has done a great job so far of really giving me concrete things to think about but at the same time saying “I want you to take the lead on this and really lead me along.”  It’s been great so far.

Good, I’m glad to hear that.  Is the play changing at all as you’re getting ready to join us for Conference?

It is!  There might be a whole scene that is no longer there and a new one in its place, so I would say so!

That’s exciting!  I’m looking forward to reading it!  So, another question that I’m personally curious about but it’s also one of those good interview questions:  Who are your theatrical heroes?

Oh man… Yeah, I love and hate this question.  When I was in my sophomore playwriting class, the first one I ever took, my playwriting teacher, Dylan Russell, who to this day is my mentor and an amazing person, she assigned each of us a play to read based on what she had perceived our aesthetic to be or what we were interested in writing about.  And I was assigned Top Girls by Caryl Churchill.  It completely – I don’t want to say changed my life because that’s such a dramatic thing to say – but at the same time, it kind of did.  The way that she writes about gender and about politics in that way is just so… After I read that play I was like ‘Okay, I want to keep doing this.’  So definitely Caryl Churchill.  Wendy Wasserstein for sure. The Heidi Chronicles is one of my favorites of all time.  I really like Durang.  And… I could go on and on.  But those are the three that are coming to my mind right now.

Those are not bad role models.   So what’s up next for you?  Are you working on anything at school right now?

Right now I am a theater major with a playwriting concentration at Marymount Manhattan College.  In the past six months I’ve also been writing my first full-length play.  Right now, the first draft is done.  It’s about 65 pages.  I’m not sure where that’s gonna go next – hopefully people will read it and give me feedback.  That’s always a helpful thing for me after a first draft.

Everybody here would be happy to read it and talk to you about it! 

Oh, really?  That’d be awesome!

Yeah, of course!  Well, it was really good chatting with you.  We’re looking forward to having you at the Conference!

Thank you!  And I’m so looking forward to being there and having this experience.  I’m really honored.

Zoe Kamil will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2015 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 7-15.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2015 competition is January 2nd.

2014 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition

Congratulations to the winning playwrights of our 2014 National Playwriting Competition!

THE DRILL by Sierra Blanco

ROAD RUNNER by Emily K. Clark

ABOUT ART by Alexa Derman

WE GO TOGETHER by Zoe Kamil

MS. MAYFIELD’S AQUARIUM by Madeleine Lobdell

SNOW GRAY by Eliana Pipes

THE RESURRECTIONIST by Spencer Slovic

NAKED FAT MAN by May Treuhaft-Ali

Meet Kathleen Kennedy

Hometown:  Syracuse, NY

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since the deadline for our 2013 National Playwriting Competition!  Since then, we read and responded to hundreds of playwrights, our committees chose finalists and winners, and we teamed the winners up with professional directors and dramaturgs.  Now, we’re just days away from welcoming seven wonderful young playwrights to our Young Playwrights Conference!

Rounding out our interview series with the Conference writers, we’re introducing you to Kathleen Kennedy.  Her play Iron Line is a surrealistic look at growing pains as a mother responds to her daughter’s peculiar transformation.

I thought I would start by asking how you got started writing plays?

I had a drama class in high school and one of the assignments was to write a play.  And so that’s how I started!

Simple enough!  You’ve submitted a couple of plays to us.  I’ve noticed that they have different styles; they live in different worlds.  Is that something you’re consciously exploring, or it just comes out that way?

I think it kind of came out that way.  Also, plays that I’ve written for different assignments or projects I’m doing.  So a lot of times I’ll have certain people I’m writing for, and that influences what the style is.

Got it.  So what was the inspiration of Iron Line?

It was for a class I was taking at Syracuse [University] while I was still in high school.   It was really a very open assignment.  I didn’t have anyone I was writing for.  And I was reading a lot of Christopher Durang at the time, which I think influenced the style quite a bit.  And my friend dared me to write a play about a girl who turns into a cat.

I can definitely see Chris Durang’s influence on it.  Are there other writers who have influenced or inspired you?

I really like Edward Albee.  I think that he’s influencing a lot of things I’m doing now.

And what kind of things are you doing now?

I’ve just been writing short scenes. I’m working on making this play that I wrote for a playwriting class my freshman year into, hopefully, a full one-act.

Do you mind me asking what it’s about?

I wish I could say what it’s about!  I’ve been trying to come up with a synopsis for a while.  It’s about a girl and some of her friends who go away on a vacation together to one of her friend’s uncle’s cabin.  One of those things on a lake.  It’s about her trying to make sense of what happens there.

Do you usually start with an image?  Or a character?  What gets you started when you have a play idea?

I think I start a lot with a character.  Usually what helps me the most is I think of who – because usually I know who’s going to be playing it.  I’m writing it for a certain thing, so I tend to write it for someone and what I want to see them do.

I know a lot of writers who start that way.  It can be really effective to get the ball rolling.  So you’re studying theater, then? 

Yeah!

How’s that going?  What kind of classes are you taking? 

I’m studying acting at Syracuse University, so a lot of voice, movement, scene Study kind of classes.

Does that influence the way you write at all?

Oh yeah.  I’ll see things in there and try to write about them.  It’s how I’ve gotten to hear about a lot of plays that I’ve never heard about before.

Going back to Iron Line, have you learned anything about the play as you work on it through the Young Playwrights process?

Yeah, I think.  They saw a lot more in it than I ever thought was in it when I first wrote it.  Like I think the director (Padraic Lillis) and dramaturg (Micah Bucey) have really helped me find more meaning in it which led to some rewrites.

What kind of meanings are you finding in it?

Originally, it was just the concept of a girl turning into a cat.  I mean, a part of me knew there was something more there than just simply that.  We talked a lot about it being a discovery of self and a discovery of sexuality, and morphing that more into the storyline than merely just the turning-into-a-cat.

Something that really resonated with me when I first read it is how much the play is about change in general, and how change can be difficult in a family situation.  Accepting how someone is changing can be a difficult thing to do and I think it’s a theatrical way to explore that. Have you had one of your own plays rehearsed before?

I have! I saw (Iron Line) done when we did it in the class in high school, because it’s paired with an acting class, so I got to see one of the scenes worked out and done in there.

How’d that go, being on the other end of the rehearsal?

Really, really well actually!  It was really weird to see – because I’ve seen some of my work done before but nothing this off-the-wall and absurdly written and I think especially for highschool students, I was scared they would just think it was weird.  But they liked it and it turned out really well, I thought.

Great!  So what’s up next for you?

We have a New Playwrights Festival at Syracuse, so one of my plays is going to be in there, and I’m going to be in one of the plays as well.

Awesome!  See you soon!

Kathleen Kennedy will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd.

Meet May Treuhaft-Ali

Hometown:  Jackson Heights, NY 

The Young Playwrights Inc. headquarters are buzzing with excitement as the 2014 National Conference approaches.  May Treuhaft-Ali will be one of the writers joining us in January – and we’re introducing you to her here!  Her play Rêve D’Amour, Op. 5-2 explores the nature of love and art through a series of dreams that span a lifetime.

How did you first get interested in theater?

I don’t ever remember not being interested in theater.  My parents took me to plays when I was a kid. So it sort of has been a lifelong love of mine and I think one day I just sort of asked myself “where do you want to be when you grow up?” And I realized, “Oh, in the theater.” And then the summer between 8th and 9th grade I spent a lot of time at the Drama Book Shop. It’s a phenomenal place and I remember after that summer spending a lot of time there and then just looking in the mirror one day when I was brushing my teeth and being like, “oh, duh. This is what I want to do.”

It’s great that you’ve pursued it so passionately.  Do any of your experiences theater-going as a kid really stand out in your memory? 

The experiences that really stood out to me actually came later when I was in 9th grade, I remember seeing Next to Normal which had a huge impact on me. I read References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot by Jose Rivera, and that is actually sitting on my shelf right now at college. That had a huge impact on me, and I play a lot with characters who aren’t human, and I think I definitely got that from that play. I read Sarah Ruhl; she’s another one that’s sitting on my desk right now. Her language is just so beautiful. That impacted me a lot. I saw this really really great play called Song for a Future Generation and it was in a teeny tiny theater Under St. Marks and it was just so cool and so incredible, so that impacted me a lot.

I notice that your plays incorporate other art forms, or at least they seem to draw inspiration from other art forms a lot. Can you talk a bit how that’s been for you? Drawing inspiration from poets and musicians and things like that?

Yeah, this is funny because I always say to myself “I’m going to write a play that doesn’t involve a painter or a pianist.” It has yet to happen. It literally never happens. So this is a funny question. I think art, like visual art and music in particular, have a big impact on my writing because they allow me to play with color and sound and I think that color and sound are so theatrical. Poetry too: it allows you to play with a dimension of language.  In a play everybody’s supposed to copy the way people talk in the real world, and when you add some poetry in there you add another language that elevates the register of the dialogue. So having art in my plays gives me more to play with in terms of the sensory information and with the theatrically, and aside from that I’m just really fascinated with what it means to be an artist. It’s something I think a lot about especially because I want to go into theater when I grow up. What is an artist, what is our place in society, what do we do for other people, and how it’s really just sort of striving. When you are creating a piece of art, you can never create it perfectly, you know, it’s never going to fully communicate everything you want it to communicate and it’s never going to—what comes out on the paper, or in the  music or whatever it is—is never fully going to be what you envision in your head. And there’s something tragic about that, about that striving. I think a lot of my plays deal with themes of striving for something impossible, of some kind of a state or some transcending of a real life, and I think a lot of that sort of transcendentalism and that escapism is what artists want, and never quite achieve.

I think people who aren’t artists yearn for that too, and that’s a big part of what’s going on in Reve D’Amour. Has your perspective on that striving or that transcendence changed since you started working on this play? 

Absolutely. I think in Reve D’amour it’s very important for me to love Max, because he’s the most real character, and he’s everything good that the real world has to offer, and to recognize that he isn’t perfect.  He’s never going to be enough but he’s something genuinely good. I don’t believe that (Amelia) should have stayed in Paris and missed her plane and smoked her cigarettes. I think marrying Max was the right thing to do for her.  That impossibility, that thing that we are striving for but can never quite reach… it’s important to be friends with that impossibility.  It’s important to not let it torture you, and to say, “You know what, this is something I’m never going to achieve, and there’s something beautiful about that. There’s something exciting about that, and even fulfilling about not achieving that. And I can be friends with that.”

It’s a really mature perspective to have on those things. Is that showing up in any new work? Are you working on anything new that’s exploring that idea?

I am working on something new, actually also dealing with an artist—big surprise.  The new play I’m working on is about a statue in a subway station who dreams of nothing but being in an art museum. So it actually deals with that theme a lot, because the statue doesn’t feel like he is art enough, and he really just wants to be art. He feels like he can’t fully achieve that in a subway station. And the museum is literally right above his head, and it’s just right out of his reach and he will never get there. So that’s a theme that I think about a lot.

That sounds great. I’m a little sad that you can’t submit it to us because you’ve aged out now!   So you’re studying theater at school now?

Yes.

How are your theater classes going?

Well, this semester I took production lab and I was the assistant stage manager for The Seagull, and it’s funny how connected The Seagull is to everything because it’s also about the meaning of art. This idea of enduring for the sake of your art.  And I think a lot of my struggle this semester was that I was assistant stage managing, I was on run crew, stuff like that—which is all very important and I really enjoyed doing it, but I felt sort of detached from the artistic process in these plays.  And then I realized that I wasn’t actually detached from it at all. Even if you are just building tables, or sweeping the stage, you are contributing to the greater arts of this school. And you’re not just sweeping the stage because you’re sweeping the stage, you’re doing it because you believe in the theatrical process and you believe in your art so deeply that sweeping the stage becomes an act of art in itself.

That’s a great way to look at it. I think the more and more theater you do, you realize how essential every person on the team is. I’m really looking forward to seeing you do another process with your play at Conference.

May Treuhaft-Ali will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Piper Rasmussen

Hometown: Columbus, Ohio 

As 2014 approaches, we’re happy to reflect on the wonderful year Young Playwrights Inc. has had.  One highlight was reading the work of Piper Rasmussen, one of the winners of the 2013 National Playwriting Competition.   And now we’re introducing her to you!  Her playRumplestiltskin explores motherhood, desire, and fulfillment as a carnival barker navigates a relationship with a local girl who may be running away.

I thought I would start by asking how you started writing plays?  

How did I get started writing plays… it was sort of a natural transition.  You know, every self-respecting preteen writes that sort-of emo poetry?  Just that act of writing pretty frequently… I ended up serendipitously writing a dialogue poem.  I took a look at it and I was like ‘why am I bothering with this intermediate thing, I should just write a story with dialogue.’  And then I did.  And then it happened again.  And then I just kept writing.

Was Rumplestiltskin your first full-length? 

Yes, it was.

And what inspired that play? 

Actually it started with an image.  I write usually starting with images.  It was somebody throwing a snowcone like a snowball at a carnie – I shouldn’t use the word carnie – at a carnival.  It sort of grew from there.  The initial place that came from was:  I want this play to be about surprise.  I want it to be about what happens when you’re completely thrown off your game.  How magical that is.  And it grew from there, and changed from there significantly.

It’s definitely an upheaval for your main character, and it’s sort of delicious to watch her navigate all of her conflicting desires.  Have you learned about the play as you’ve continued to work on it through this process?

I think that implies a direction to playwriting: that the play is like this sculpture you carve out of a piece of rock.  I’m not sure it isn’t a different play every time it goes through a revision.  So I learn what I want to say better each time I go through a revision.  But I wouldn’t say that I learn necessarily more about the play itself because I don’t think the play is a single entity.

In the most recent iteration of it, what do you think you’ve learned about what you’re saying?

My dramaturg, Daniel Pearle, has helped a lot with this.  I’m learning more, as I focus in on some of the non-central – they’re all pretty central – on some of the non-Jess and non-Lindy characters, that each of these people tries to find the richness in their life in a different way.  Or that they can’t find the richness in their life, and that’s what everybody’s struggling for:  they’re looking for richness and they’re looking for magic.  It’s more about diversity than it used to be.  Diversity in life-approach.

And I can see that as I’m thinking about how the play has changed.  You mentioned before we started the interview that you’re taking some classes in theater and some classes in educational psychology.  How is that going for you right now? 

It’s great.  I don’t think I ever want… I shouldn’t say that yet.  Because I’m, you know, I’m 19.  I don’t know what I’m gonna do.  I don’t think I want to be a teacher at this point.  But I really enjoy thinking about the way that educational studies and theater interact, because education is performance.  And what do we learn through performance?   And the two fields are interacting in a really interesting way right now.

That’s great. And I know you said you’re in finals right now.  Do you have any projects coming up or are you just focusing on finals? 

I’m spearheading, with the help of a faculty advisor, Barnard’s partnership with the Broadway Green Alliance. We’re going to be working to make Barnard’s theater department more eco-friendly next semester.  That’s something I’ve done before.  I worked with Planet Connections Theatre Festivity here in the city.  That’s a whole other lecture I could give!  About theater and the environment interacting.  You know, go very college freshman on this.  I mean, I’m a sophomore, I should be moving past that, right?

No, I feel like it’s an important thing to talk about!  Give me a mini-lecture on theater and the environment! 

Great!  I’m talking about traditional theater more in this context.  We create little environments.  We create worlds on the stage.  We create a world on this, like, 36 by 48 platform, and we use actual aspects of the world around us.  And we try to build that world out of pieces and parts; it’s like a Frankenstein interpretation of… anything. And I think that’s something that a lot of theater fails to acknowledge, like ‘I want to create a representation of the world and I don’t want the audience to think about what is up on the stage that was actually something else at some point.’  That’s a really lofty statement.  I think it would actualize itself into like, ‘hey look: this chair used to be a trash can.’  I think it’s gonna take a lot of smart people, especially as our resources are starting to be depleted as a country and the whole world – we as theater practitioners have a responsibility to represent that on stage, that we are using resources to create the world that we want.  And that that use of resources – not just like stuff – but wood, metal – needs to be conscious. Does that make any sense?

I think it makes a lot of sense.  It’s a really important idea to get out there.  Well, we’ll wrap up here.  We’re looking forward to getting to know you more at Conference! 

Piper Rasmussen will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Niki Acton

Hometown: Grandville, MI 

The holiday season is in full-swing and so is our interview series of the 2013 National Competition Winners!  This week we’re thrilled to introduce you to Niki Acton, whose play War is a tense drama that explores the pressures put on relationships.  In it, Tucker needs Lucy to keep him awake – his life depends on it.

I wanted to start by asking what your trick is because you’re a very prolific writer.  You’ve submitted a lot of work to us over the years!  How do you keep yourself writing at such a high volume? 

For the last four years I’ve been in playwriting classes pretty consistently.  I went to an art high school and majored in creative writing there.  So I guess I’ve been required to produce a lot of work.  And there are definitely plays that I’m more fond of and that have been more meaningful to me to work on than others.

I’ve noticed some threads run through your plays.  War has a bit of a connection to some other plays you’ve written, right? 

Yeah!  I think recently I’ve realized that a couple recurring themes in my work are the mythological elements of medicine, and mythology as a whole.  I’m working on a novel now about these three children who have a heart defect, and the youngest thinks it’s a curse and is setting out to break this curse.  And I’ve written about conjoined twins, and other medical pieces.  So, War is very much in line with that.  And I really enjoy doing the research about these odd medical disorders and finding ways to make them poetic, and beautiful, and strange.

I think you find a lot of compassion for the people in your plays who have these medical conditions.  Was there a particular idea or image that inspired War?  

I think I got lost in some medical site online one day and discovered this disorder called Ondine’s curse, or – a long medical name that I don’t really know how to pronounce.  And I thought it was just so interesting: the idea that when you sleep you lose your ability to regulate your own breathing.  I thought there was a lot of potential for that.  One of my friends at the time was working on this short story about this really religious young girl who was using religion to cope with her parents’ divorce.  I was reading her story and she included the prayer Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.  And I really wanted to include that but with this version I just couldn’t really get in there… But sort of this haunting idea that when you fall asleep you may not wake up.  And the reliance that you would have to have on other people when you have that sort of condition.

You capture the tension of that really well in this piece.  Have you learned anything about the play as you’ve been working on it through the Young Playwrights process?  

I think as I was writing this play my biggest struggle was with the relationship between the two characters because there has to be such a delicate balance in order for the ending to be effective.  We can’t hate either of them, and what Lucy decides to do has to be justifiable in the mind of the audience.  So there has to be a certain element of sort-of… asshole-ness to Tucker but he also has to be sweet enough that Lucy has stayed with him for so long.  So, in working with my director (Amanda Junco) and my dramaturg (Sarah Gancher) I’ve been focusing on finding the balance in their relationship and making it as believable as I can.

I heard that you had quite a funny experience when talking to Sarah for the first time. 

Yeah!  She called me and she was like “Yeah so I’m pretty sure I’m going into labor right now.  It’s fine.  We’ll just do this.  I wanna get this done now because if I am going into labor and I have a baby I won’t be able to help you as much.”  She still managed to give me some really great advice and some really great input.  And some issues that I had been struggling with… she offered some advice with that.

Great!  So are you studying playwriting now?  

I’m a double major in Theater and Creative Writing now.  This sounds awful but I’ve gotten bored with playwriting classes.  I feel like there’s so much you can learn in a classroom setting.  At my school, the theater department is really small, and they encourage you to study all the different aspects of theater.  So I’ve studied costume design and stage management and I’m gonna be directing next term.  I’m trying to give myself a really broad education when it comes to theater that I think will help me when I’m writing plays.  To know what’s possible and what makes an exciting play for everyone on the production team.

Theater’s one of those things where the more you know about every task, the better you are at your own task.

And you’re able to communicate with everyone on their own level, and I think that’s really valuable.

So what’s up next for you?

I’ve worked with the Blank Theater Company’s Young Playwrights Festival for three years.  I’ve aged out of it now but I’m going back there in December.  They’re doing a reading of a full-length play.  I’ll be out there for a week and a half working with that team and seeing a reading of that play.  At school I’m just focusing on directing next term.  In my spring trimester, a friend of mine is going to try direct my play.

Sounds like you’re keeping yourself busy!  What’s the play that The Blank is doing? 

It’s called McComb 1964.  It takes place in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer.  It focuses on a family and they have two daughters, and one of them is in a relationship with the black son of the family’s maid.  And the other starts to have feelings for a female freedom fighter who has come down with the movement.  It’s a parallel of the struggle for civil rights and the struggle for gay rights we’re still dealing with today.

Wow!  Sounds great!  Well, we’ll wrap up here.  We look forward to working with you onWar during the Conference!

Niki Acton will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd. 

Meet Alaina Demopoulos

Hometown:  Stratham, NH 

It’s the third week of our interview series with the winners of our 2013 National Competition!  We’re thrilled to introduce you to Alaina Demopoulos, whose play Almost Cut My Hair is a bittersweet drama that revolves around a Vietnam War draft-dodger returning home after ten years abroad.

I’d love to hear about your journey with Almost Cut My Hair… because the circumstances you wrote it under were interesting! 

It’s coming up on like two years ago because it was my Thanksgiving break my junior year of high school and my parents scheduled me to get my wisdom teeth out three days before Thanksgiving. So it was terrible. I was in so much pain, I had a really bad reaction to getting them out—I mean everyone does. I got a fever.  I had so much percocet in my system…. it was crazy. I actually don’t really remember starting the play because I was on drugs when I started writing it.  I had slept all day because I had been tired, and then I woke up and Easy Rider was on TV. It was like midnight and I’m watching Easy Rider in and out of consciousness and I mean it’s a trippy movie anyway… And I just remember thinking about the injustices of the world and getting really angry and like “Ugh, it’s such an injustice I can’t eat anything on Thanksgiving!” And I started listening to Stephen Stills solo album Manassas—the original title of the play was called Fallen Eagle because he has another album which is more explicitly about draft dodgers and I was listening to that over and over and over again and I just started writing it. I was done with the original draft that night.

That’s amazing that it just poured out of you that way.  

Yeah, I think that the thing is I’ve had so much time to revise and I’ve gotten older and I like to think that my writing has become more sophisticated, so it’s really great to have this kind of like super crazy jumping or starting point and then being able to cut back.  I go back to it so much to change and edit.

Tell me a bit more about how you think your voice has changed, or how your technique has become more sophisticated.

I have definitely had a lot of help with that because my sophomore and junior years of high school I was part of this program at Hartford Stage which is pretty similar to Young Playwrights. It starts in the fall, and we had like 5 or 6 other people—all Connecticut high school students—and over the course of the year we worked with a Fellow that they have there (my first year it was Will Power and my second year it was Marcus Gardley) so I had the idea kind of germinating and I was able to take a scene of Almost Cut My Hair and I worked with it at my second year at Hartford Stage and it was workshopped there (a 15-minute excerpt from it that I kind of took and made its own thing) so I’ve done that a lot. I like to take out scenes of it and rewrite them so that they can stand alone. I think it teaches me a lot about what I’m trying to say.  I’m super into history and really into researching—so it has been great. I think earlier my research was really superficial but truly like historically I really didn’t know too much. And I had this awesome teacher at my high school, Dr. Wethers, and he was a bit of a scholar on the actual war—the Vietnam War—a lot of the military history which I knew nothing about and he was more than happy to share with me all of these books and things he had written and stuff from his dissertation which is really great.

That’s fantastic, and you definitely have a vested interest in history and social issues and politics because you shared another play with us.  

One Child Born.

Do you want to give a synopsis of One Child Born?

It’s about a young woman who lives in present day Iran and she’s obsessed with Western culture because she’s in such restrictive Iranian culture and it’s about her and her friends and their attempt to rebel and live the life that they deserve to have.

It’s a really compelling story. You have a real knack for carving out particular individuals against the backdrop of larger issues.  And I know that the dramaturg you you are working with for Young PIaywrights Inc.—Morgan Jenness—was really excited about both of your plays. How has your work been with Morgan?

Morgan, she is so cool.  It’s really actually funny because, since I go to school in NYC we met at a coffee shop to talk about Almost Cut My Hair and talk about her edits and everything. Before too long, she asked me who my professors were and I found out that she and one of my favorite professors both worked with Sam Shepard in the early 70’s, so it’s really really cool just to see how connected and small this playwriting world is, especially in New York City.

Yup, it is a tiny tiny theatrical world! So you’ve been telling me a bit about your professors. So you’re studying playwriting now?

I’m studying dramatic writing. I’m in my first year, I’m in intro to everything—playwriting, screenwriting and TV writing. And then at the end of my Sophomore year I pick a concentration. So really I’ve only had experience in playwriting. We’re just starting screenwriting now which is so great because I would love to write a movie, just because movies can reach so many more people, and I would love to turn Almost Cut My Hair into a screenplay, but screenwriting is very difficult so I’ve got a lot to learn. It’s funny when you think you know so much bout something and then you realize you’ve got so much more to learn.

That’s a great perspective to have because once you feel like you know everything, you stop growing, right?   To wrap up, are there any projects coming up for you that you’re excited about?

I’m doing a lot for school.  So far we’ve written ten-page plays and thirty-page plays and ten-minute screenplays and by the end of the semester we’ll have a thirty-minute screenplay. And it’s really great to work on a deadline. So often I think, “ooh, I’m a writer, I’ll get it done, I’ll get it done.” But it’s really nice to actually have a deadline because that’s how life works. But who knows, Thanksgiving break is coming up so maybe I’ll bang out another crazy thing, I don’t know.

Great!  We are very much looking forward to having you at conference and working onAlmost Cut My Hair some more.

Alaina Demopoulos will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Emily Sheera Cutler

Hometown: Birmingham, Alabama 

Well, it’s that time of year again:  the holiday music is echoing down 5th Avenue – and into the Young Playwrights Inc. headquarters!  The ringing bells provided a backdrop for the second installment of this year’s interview series with our National Competition Winners.  This week, we’re introducing you to Emily Sheera Cutler.  Her play The Road Trip is a portrait of a complex friendship as two teenagers sneak out and hit the highway – leaving behind deeply troubling circumstances.

I was hoping to start with getting to know how you got involved with Young playwrights Inc.  

I found out about it when I was at a playwriting conference… The Sewanee Writers conference.  I think our teacher told us that there was this contest and we should submit.  I submitted and got Finalist for two years and this year I won.  And then last year I also went to the Urban Retreat.

How was Urban Retreat for you?  

I really liked it, it was a great experience.   I still keep in touch with some of the friends I made there.  It was just really cool to be around all playwrights for a week.  A lot of times at writing conferences you’re with a lot of writers but not necessarily playwrights.

Cool!  So, The Road Trip, was this the first year you submitted to us? 

No, I actually submitted it last year.  And then I got an evaluation that suggested a lot of different things about the characters and the plot so I made those revisions and sent it back.

It was really a pleasure to watch the play develop.  What inspired The Road Trip?  

A lot of things, I think.  My own personal experience in high school definitely inspired it.  It kind of made me think about what it means to be that age in the world today.  Just the idea of breaking the rules:  I really wanted to write a play about that concept.  And about what rules do to limit us and what they do to help us.  And what it means to have to live by certain rules or when to break certain rules.

The play has received a lot of negative criticism because of the subject matter of a teacher-student relationship.   I’ve written other plays and other essays about teacher-student relationships, because I think it’s a very interesting issue and it’s something morally ambiguous – which is something I’m always interested in as a playwright.

So what’s your feeling about writing on things that upset people in that way? What’s your feeling about writing on politically controversial or morally ambiguous situations? 

I think being a playwright sometimes means sacrificing being politically correct or diplomatic and polite about not talking about controversial topics… and sacrificing that in order to be an honest playwright and portray relationships truthfully and also communicate a message effectively.  That’s something that’s really important to me as a playwright:  I don’t want to be afraid to say anything.  I don’t ever want to hold back, because maybe what I’m holding back is what somebody else can really relate to or connect to on a universal level.

Do you see different things in the play now that you’re a little bit older than when you wrote it? 

Yeah, definitely.  Talking to my dramaturg (Alice Pencavel) about it was a really interesting experience.  I feel like I saw more than I had seen before.  A lot about the association of pain and love.  Also, we did a small, informal staged reading at Penn.  And that made me see that it was about fear and anger –  that those were kind of polar opposites running through it.

You mentioned University of Pennsylvania.  How are things going for you there?  

Really good.  I love my major.

What are you studying? 

Communications.

Is there a particular focus within that?

I’m thinking maybe civic or public service – I’m not sure yet though.  And then my minor is creative writing.

Gotcha.  Have things you’ve been learning in your communications major been influencing your theater-making?

I think so, yeah.  I’m actually doing a project right now on theater and social change.  It’s just interesting to learn about the broader context of it.  I was actually going to be a Theater major but I think Communications asks more of the question of Why while Theater asks more of the question of How.  It’s really cool to have that perspective:  (A major in Theater asks) how to make quality theater and how the process works, while Communications is more of the broader question of Why we do it in the first place.  Like what messages we send.

A lot of times people think of (theater) as just entertainment or just going up on stage and having fun –  which is great, too.  But I think really we do it because we want to talk about what it means to be human.  And that’s a little bit scary to talk about in real life.  But for some reason in theater, it’s safe to talk about.

In terms of communication, one thing I’ve really enjoyed about your writing is how subtextual the communication is between people and how much of an appreciation you have of the unspoken between characters.  Is that something you’re conscious of while you’re writing?

I think it developed as I grew as a writer.  I think listening to people’s conversations was something that really helped, and just figuring out what people do say and what people don’t say.  There’s definitely a difference on stage than in real life too:  on stage, people tend to say more than they do in real life.  So it’s finding that balance.

Are there certain writers who have been really inspiring to you?  

My favorite playwright is Larry Kramer.  I think his conflicts and conversations are really great.  And Sarah Ruhl, Paula Vogel… I think the subtext there is really prominent.

So what’s up next for you at UPenn?  

My play is being produced in the Spring.  When they heard that it would be workshopped in New York, they said they would produce it here.  It will performed on April 4th and 5th.

That’s really exciting!  We’ll have to get the word out about it! 

Emily Sheera Cutler will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers.

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd.

Meet Chloé Hayat

Hometown:  New York City 

Fall is an exciting time of year for Young Playwrights Inc.  Along with pumpkin spice, there’s an eagerness in the air as we prepare to welcome our National Playwriting Competition winners to our annual Young Playwrights Conference.  We’ve gotten to know them better as they begin working with professional dramaturgs and directors, exploring and refining their plays before rehearsals in January, 2014.  And we want you to get to know them as well!  Each week leading up to Conference, our Literary Manager, Nick Gandiello, will be interviewing a different playwright.  We start the series off with Chloé Hayat, whose play Electric Blues is a surrealistic exploration of a man’s time on death row.

It’s exciting: this is the first interview that we’re doing this year, and I’m happy that it’s with one of our Young Playwrights Inc. alums! 

Yeah!

I started as the Literary Manager this year, so I was interested to hear about your history with Young Playwrights Inc. and how we got to know you. 

Wow, okay, I’m pretty sure, if I remember correctly:  I took the Urban Retreat the summer before sophomore year of high school and that was so much fun.  I didn’t really know that there were yearlong classes as well but my good friend Tori Lassman who has also been with Young Playwrights a really long time –

A former National Competition winner as well! 

Yeah!  She told me that you do have yearlong classes and that I should sign up for one or try to get in.  And then I did.  And I just couldn’t leave!  Actually, leaving Young Playwrights senior year of high school was far more upsetting and emotional for me and more of a rite of passage than it was graduating high school.

I’m both glad and sad to hear that it was that kind of experience.  Do you remember a particular play you worked on in the Advanced Playwriting Workshop? 

Well actually Electric Blues… I started writing my last year in APW.

It’s a fantastic play.  I’d love to hear where the inspiration for this play came from. 

I had read Dead Man Walking for school over the summer before senior year.  Then I wrote my final – I can’t remember what it was called! –  public policy paper for my exit project in high school on the death penalty.  And it is such a moving topic for me.  I feel very passionately, obviously, against the subject.  I wanted to find a way that an artist could change something about it.  I thought that putting a face (to it) and making this issue human could really bring more light to the topic than numbers and facts.  So, Trigg, my main character, is my human face to such a horrible, controversial topic.

I think that’s a really amazing way to describe this play.  You really get inside Trigg’s experience in a very intimate, very theatrical way.  Is this the style you usually write in? 

Um… Yeah!  Well, all of my YPI plays were really, like, dark, and not comical, but…  My stage directions, I write them as a character.  So that’s something I learned from Young Playwrights Inc.  I read so many plays and knowing what I thought was interesting to read as opposed to just seeing.  In high school, I studied acting, and our acting teachers would say ‘ignore the stage directions.’  And the playwright in me always got really angry about that because someone wrote those for a reason!  Like Sarah Ruhl does something like this – and I think she’s amazing.  You would never, ever ignore Sarah Ruhl’s stage directions.

You mention Sarah Ruhl.  What other writers have meant a lot to you as a playwright?

(Sigh) Okay, this is gonna be a little bit long.  Love, love, with all my heart: Suzan-Lori Parks.  I think she is the greatest thing on two legs.  And Beckett.  And Brecht.  Edward Albee, I love Edward Albee.  Oo!  Actually at YPI, we got to have a Q & A with him and I asked him a question and I feel like that was one of the greatest experiences with YPI.  Because he was so mean to everybody and he answered my question really nicely.  And that meant a lot to me.

Ha!  I’ll have to decide whether to edit that out of the interview or not.  Anyway, that’s a really great list of writers.  And I can see their writing influencing you.  Going back to Suzan-Lori Parks, what about her writing has inspired you? 

She manages to tackle some large issues but she doesn’t really slap you in the face with them.  And she has this style that is so clearly hers that you could read one line and you would know exactly who it was and what she’s trying to say.  And she’s so interesting and different and brilliant. We studied her last year in one of my classes at Purchase and she says that she styles her plays around shapes.  Like there was one that was in the shape of a cassette tape.  I love the way she thinks about her art.

You mentioned Purchase.  What are you doing at SUNY Purchase now? 

I’m majoring in Playwriting and Screenwriting.  One of my teachers is also a Young Playwrights alum:  Sylvan Oswald.  I love him.  He’s so excellent.   Actually, right now, I’m on my way to my screenwriting class.  I had never really written a screenplay before I came to Purchase.  And then actually knowing how different it is than playwriting makes me appreciate playwriting all the more.

While you’re learning at Purchase with Sylvan and in your screenwriting class, have you learned anything about Electric Blues as you keep working on it? 

This is more personal…  I’ve learned a lot of things about it since starting Purchase.  I started writing it in senior year, then I stopped, then I finished it while I was at Purchase.  And in between that space, my grandmother had died.  I hadn’t realized that I had accidentally written her in the play before she had even passed away.  She has come to life as Mamma in my play – as Trigger’s mother.  She was from Missouri, and she had this very Southern, twangy thing about her.  And she had all these funny phrases that I had just put into that play… and it turned out that she had been in there the whole time.  And that came to life at Purchase.

That’s a great discovery.  I really relate to that: that moment that you realize you’ve been grappling with something that you weren’t even aware of while writing.  So has there been any work you’ve been doing with Dipika Guha, your dramaturg, gearing up for the Conference? 

Oh yeah!  She was so helpful.  She sent me a bunch of plays that really, really, really inspired me and helped narrow in my questions and my style.  She gave me questions to work with that had never ever popped into my mind.  One of them was how Mamma’s world is relevant to Trigg’s.  During the play, his world is falling apart; is hers doing the same?  …That question really helped me focus my play more than anything else.

I’m really glad to hear you made that discovery with her.  Well, I’ll let you get to your screenwriting class – I hope that goes well!  I’m really looking forward to working with you during Conference.  

Chloé Hayat will be joining six other playwrights at the 2014 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 8-16.  We will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers. 

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2014 competition is January 2nd.

2013 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition

Congratulations to the winning playwrights of our 2013 National Playwriting Competition!

ALMOST CUT MY HAIR by Alaina Demopoulos

ELECTRIC BLUES by Chloe Hayat

THE ROAD TRIP by Emily Sheera Cutler

IRON LINE by Kathleen Kennedy

REVE D’AMOUR, OP. 5-2 by May Treuhaft-Ali

WAR by Nicole Acton

RUMPLESTILTSKIN by Piper Rasmussen

Anna Brenner ’12 – Winner of the National Playwriting Competition

from Kevin D. Ramsey

Anna Alison Brenner ’12 is a winner of the 2012 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition. Her play, “Tiger, Tiger” won the competition and had a staged reading on Tuesday, 15 January 2013 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. In this interview she discusses her influences, her work at Trinity, and her experience in the competition.

Watch here.

Meet Conor Hague LaRocque

Hometown: Auburn, AL 

This interview is my last in the series introducing you to our 2012 Young Playwrights Inc. National Competition winners. The Young Playwrights Conference is a few days away: on January 9th, the winning playwrights will join us in Manhattan and spend the week in rehearsals, workshops, and at the theater. If you haven’t already done so, please make your free reservations to attend the readings by following the link at the bottom of this article. This week I caught up with Conor LaRocque, whose play Boots kicks off when a young woman on a search for Mr. Right brings home her latest candidate to meet the family: a sweet boy who wears a bowtie and has a penchant for glasses of milk.

Where am I reaching you today?
I am in Auburn, Alabama, for Christmas break.

Are you from Auburn? Isn’t there a football team there—I mean, a school?
I am, and yes, Auburn University…we take football pretty seriously here so it is sort of hard not to take an interest… They had a tough season this year, but—I’m hoping they can turn things around next year.

I want to ask you a couple of questions about your play, starting with the title of your play: Who is Boots?
Well, Boots is one of the central characters of the play. He is a ten-year-old boyfriend who is brought to his so-called girlfriend’s house for dinner and is essentially the impetus for the conflict that takes place during the play. Originally when I started writing the play the character of Boots was supposed to be this idiotic older boyfriend to the…mother [instead of the daughter], so things were very different. But I guess Boots’ character evolved during the writing of the play, but the name stuck. It’s a bizarre name and I felt it fit with the bizarre framework of the play.

How did this play come to be?
I wrote the play because I heard about this regional playwriting competition, [The Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Young Southern Writers’ Project One Act Play Competition],through my theater class my senior year of high school and it seemed like a thing I’d be interested in doing. As for particular inspiration, it is difficult for me to point to—I think it was a process. I will say that in terms of plot it is similar to the concept of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but believe it or not I wasn’t really thinking about that film when I was writing it…basically, I had started writing the play without much of a plan—I was just eager to get started, and I wasn’t thrilled with what I had before, so, I just tried to think of ways that I could make it more interesting for myself while writing it so that I would be more committed to actually finishing this play that I was writing.

And how did your play do in that competition?
It was one of ten finalists.

That is wonderful, congratulations!
So that was… an encouraging thing, so I spruced it up a little bit later on before submitting it to [the Young Playwrights Inc. National] Competition.

Have you written any other plays besides Boots?
Not really, this was my first foray into playwriting… I have started another playwriting project but it is sort of on hold for the time being… but I would certainly like to write more plays in the future.

What appeals to you about playwriting?
I’ve grown up around the theater: my parents taught in the theater department at Auburn University, and I saw all of the plays that they directed as well as many others. I’ve always had that exposure to theater, that’s always stuck with me. And then I developed an interest in writing by my freshman year in high school… So, when I heard about the competition it just seemed like it would be a good way to spend my time because I had appreciation for the theater as well as writing.

So you grew up seeing a lot of theater. Do you remember the first play you ever saw?
I remember when I was younger I had a hard time staying awake through all of the shows…I think one that I was awake through was a production of Grease that my father directed, and he also had a small part in it as well. That’s one of the earlier plays that I remember that I was actually awake for the entirety of… It was interesting, but also a little surprising because my father usually had this mustache, and he had to shave it off for this role, and it was sort of traumatic for me that he shaved it off because it was something that I was so used to.

Do you have any writers or plays that you are particularly fond of?
I am particularly fond of Neil Simon. A few years ago I saw Auburn’s production of Brighton Beach Memoirs, and I remember really enjoying that story. And I’ve read a couple of Neil Simon’s other plays and I really appreciate his sense of humor and the way he creates characters that are very interesting…

What are you studying at school now?
English…I go to Rhodes College in Memphis. I really like it. I wanted to go somewhere smaller, which Rhodes is. I like the small class sizes and it seemed like it had a strong English department, and from the few English professors I have come across so far, I really liked them a lot, so I’m pretty excited about the years to come. It is a good fit for me… There is a concentration in creative writing that I am looking to explore. I took a fiction writing course this most recent semester and I enjoyed that a lot. I am also involved in acting as an extracurricular activity. That is just another way that my upbringing around the theater influenced me. It’s something that I do that I think is a good way of developing new insights about playwriting.

Do you have a favorite role that you have played in the past? Or a role that really helped you discover something about playwriting or theater in general?
The most recent role I played is Jack in [Stephen Sondheim’s] Into the Woods, and that was certainly a good experience I had sort of stretching my comfort zone. It’s something I enjoy participating in and something I plan on continuing to do.

As you look at your future in theater, do you see yourself pursuing both acting and playwriting?
Well, as much as I enjoy acting I don’t think I will end up doing that because I have been around actors who have made acting their profession—and they are great people—but sometimes it seems like they have had to sacrifice a more stable living situation; maybe they haven’t gotten around to having a family or something because of all of the traveling that they have had to do or what not. So I really enjoy it as an extracurricular, but not as a career. And as for playwriting, I’d certainly like to do more of that in later years, but I would have to explore that while holding down a different kind of job…

Yes, you do sound like you grew up around theater because you know how that is!
But both playwriting and acting are both activities that I enjoy and for the near future will continue to participate in those activities.

Well, it has been great talking with you and I am looking forward to meeting you in person in the new year!

Conor Hague LaRocque will be joining seven other playwrights at the 2013 Young Playwrights Conference in New York City, January 9-17. This year we will be inviting members of the Young Playwrights family (like you!) to the readings of these talented young writers. 

The deadline for writers in the United States aged 18 and under to submit a play to our 2013 competition is January 2nd. 

Happy Holidays!

Elizabeth Bojsza, Literary Manager