Reading student-written plays
One of the things that has kept me very busy during the last two weeks or more is reading student-written plays. Although I am on sabbatical, I am still the chair of playwriting in my region for the Kennedy Center-American College Theatre Festival. This great organization offers opportunities and awards to students at colleges and universities of all sizes across the U.S. in acting, directing, dramaturgy, design, stagecraft, stage management, and playwriting--my area. This is the month when student-written plays of all lengths about all kinds of subjects get read by committees and chosen for regional prizes; readings for national awards come next month.
Students who write these plays come from graduate and undergraduate programs, from programs that offers classes in playwriting and those that don't--where the kids write and produce their work anyway.
It is understandable that most programs throw the biggest part of their budgeting behind classic, familiar plays and musicals... because theatre draws a small enough crowd anyway, and unfamiliar plays draw an even smaller portion of that crowd. New plays--those written by students--usually get the smallest portion, and some of the most enthusiastic audiences.
At My U, we have an annual playwriting festival that produces three original full-length plays written by seniors. I can't tell you how many times I have talked to spectators surprised that these students wrote about more than, well, pizza, beer, and party hook-ups.
Indeed.
This last couple of weeks, while I have been reading plays from my region and our exchange region, I have thought about that. It is pretty amazing what these 18 to 22 year-olds think about--and think deeply about. I am no longer surprised when I get plays about a kid who pretends to be a comic book hero to save his mother from an abusive relationship, or a woman dealing with her fears about in-vitro fertilization by having fantasies about the perfect child, or a vet returning from Desert Storm who suffers PTS while trying to reconnect with his family, or two cows making a basement full of chicken milk bombs to protest what happens in a meat-packing plant (I do not kid), or the Biblical story of Doubting Thomas, or the story of the Wright brothers building and flying the first plane, or a woman haunted by the vision of Typhoid Mary as an exploration of insanity and depression. Yeah, shallow stuff like this. Plays about multiple sclerosis and a brother's death and returning as a cockroach and choosing between treatment for cancer or a long-awaited pregnancy... written not as soap operas or melodramas but as genuinely moving dramatic pieces with real characters, strong dialogue, and action that catches the reader's interest.
And by the way, some of the best are about beer, pizza, and hok-ups, sicne those events--and the emotions embedded within them--are so very familiar to these young writers.
Where do our new plays come from? Our future plays and screenplays and TV scripts and, hey, video games?
From these kids. So it is a pleasure to be reading these first scripts.
Pearl
