w o r d p l a yThe Newsletter of Young Playwrights Inc September 2010

An Experience of a Lifetime

The winners of the 2010 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition have been selected! These ten talented writers will be attending our Young Playwrights Conference January 5-13, 2011 in New York City to workshop their plays in preparation for Off-Broadway staged readings on January 10-12. Congratulations to all!

Alexandra Ashworth, Portland, OR for Wonders Bennett would have been a senior in high school by now, if it weren’t for the cancer that she has battled off and on for nearly half of her life. When her diagnosis becomes terminal, she must reevaluate her relationships and her beliefs.

Kat Blackburn, Chicago, IL for Deliver Me From Evil This poetic drama follows the path of a child abuse survivor split into four distinct personalities.

Jake Brasch, Denver, CO for Two Cups of Coffee What at first appears to be a conversation between two strangers over a cup of coffee becomes so much more as the audience realizes the extent to which the couple is actually connected.

Ben Ellentuck, New York, NY for The Human Heart Wife and Husband are not smart, but they are rich—which has always allowed them to more than get by. When Son comes home from school with news about a heart problem, their perfect life of privilege is challenged.

Aliza Goldstein, Jacksonville, FL for Other People’s Garden Gnomes Ophelia is trying to cope, but it just seems like so much is out of her control. When she ends up in a hospital waiting room late at night after a friend is injured while stealing lawn ornaments, she is forced to make a move.

Danny Rothschild, Interlochen, MI for A Ninth Time A story from long ago about guilt and a tree that causes you to forget.

Ruby Spiegel, Brooklyn, NY for All Ye Know An aspiring televangelist hires an aspiring filmmaker to help record segments of his sermons, which focus on beauty treatments as a form of worship.

Benjamin Drew Sprung-Keyser, Los Angeles, CA for What All Schoolchildren Learn When the victim of bullying turns the tables, a school is shaken by the terrorism that results.

Zachary Weaver, Overland Park, KS for According to Their LearningCheryl decides to poke her nose in the yard next door to talk to the homeschooled kids there, and she gets more than she bargains for.

Chase Yenser, Whitehall, PA for Pictures and Dreams Blake is an ordinary teenage boy who becomes trapped in extraordinary circumstances when he discovers he can meet with his dead girlfriend in his dreams.

BlockWriter’s Read This!We asked these playwrights, “If you could recommend one play to our readers, what would it be and why?” Here’s what they said:

I would recommend Unmerciful Good Fortune by Edwin Sanchez because it’s poetic and honest and beautifully constructed -- nearly perfect, in my opinion.

Jose Rivera is the Obie-Award winning author of Marisol, Cloud Tectonics, and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot.

Oh, man. I wish I could recommend 50. Really I would recommend one of my own plays but failing that, how about Scab by Sheila Callaghan. Sam French has it.

Adam Szymkowicz has been writing plays for 13 years and went to two grad schools in order to learn how to do it right.

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo. Gionfriddo’s biting humor and honest portrayals are truly unique. The play is truly compelling, even if you’re only reading it.

HAYLEY TYLER CHIN is a grateful alumnus of YPI’s Advanced Playwriting Workshop and will be attending Harvard College this fall.

I would recommend David Hare’s THE POWER OF YES. Here we are in the heart of a worldwide banking failure and one writer has already cut through an enormous amount of cant and hysteria to put the bankers downstage, facing out, in merciless light. The miracle is that the play is so rich and multifaceted and infused with empathy. We should all be aspiring to this kind of thriving engagement with the real world.

Craig Lucas directed the movies The Dying Gaul and Birds of America.

Read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. His world is the Russian landed aristocracy of a hundred years ago--not something most of us are familiar with, yet he makes it familiar. How does he do it? He treats all his characters, even the unpleasant ones, humanely. He doesn’t judge them, but just lets them act.And he writes about two things that still obsess us: love and career.

Clarence Coo is in the MFA playwriting program at Columbia University, where he is studying with Charles Mee.

The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl. It’s one of my favorite plays, and a perfect read for one of these lazy breezy days. (Sarah Ruhl’s plays are just really fun to read in general!)

Ben Ellentuck is a 2010 National Playwriting Competition winner and a four-year participant in the Advanced Playwriting Workshop at Young Playwrights Inc.

Save the Date!Coming Soon from Young Playwrights Inc. . . .

October 23 & 24 Teacher Training Institute

January 3, 2011 National Playwriting Competition Postmark Deadline

January 10-12 Young Playwrights Conference Readings Series

February 5-6 Teacher Training Institute

March 1 Write A Play! NYC Competition Postmark Deadline

March 1 Urban Retreat Early Bird Application Postmark Deadline

Supporting the ArtsIn this age of instant information, we’re pounded by news that tells us every minute of every day is a fight: to regain our ethical equilibrium, safeguard our health, bolster our economy, or ensure the habitability of our planet. These fights are all necessary and long overdue – but every once in a while we also need to pay attention to the glimmer of hope that can come from something quietly important. For tens of thousands of young people across the country, that something is Young Playwrights Inc.

In the first nine months of 2010, Young Playwrights Inc. guided 10 talented playwrights to their first Off-Broadway presentations. We provided 41 advanced young artists with the tools they will need to develop thrilling new works and have given over 3,000 students the introduction to the art of playwriting that we know will also help to improve their literacy and learning skills. We read and evaluated over 700 plays from enthusiastic young writers hoping to be chosen for next year’s Young Playwrights Conference (10 of them will make the exciting trek to New York City in January 2011) and another 250 for Write A Play! NYC). And with our partners, the Anne Frank Center USA and the Vineyard Theater, we took the Diary 21 project into its second year and got 120 students to focus on the question “are we writing loud enough?”. All of this while preparing for the next Young Playwrights Festival, fielding invitations to present our work from Astoria to Alabama to Australia, watching our alumni achieve creative success around the world.

Young Playwrights Inc. is an organization where art matters, where education matters, where our children’s dreams matter, and where your contributions matter. As we approach our 30th year, we hope you’ll help us to continue to make a dramatic difference with America’s youth by supporting our work as generously as you can. For more information on how to be a Young Playwrights Inc. supporter email admin@youngplaywrights.org or call 212.594.5440

In Young Playwrights Inc.’s 29 years of experience conducting in-school and after-school Write A Play! Workshops, we have seen how important grants can be in enabling partnerships with schools. We are constantly looking for both new and returning partners and new sources of funding in order to bring our curriculum to students. This past year, Young Playwrights Inc. partnered with Renaissance Charter School in Queens under the Arts in the Schools Grant (AIS), a program of the Queens Council on the Arts. This program regrants funds from the Local Capacity Building Program of the New York State Council on the Arts to support creative community partnerships among artists, schools, and arts/cultural institutions in the borough of Queens.

Partnerships are more important than ever in today’s economy, and it all starts with people. Rebekkah Oakes, Development Director for Renaissance Charter School began discussions with our Director of Instruction last August; and soon after, Cristine Slingerland, a sixth grade teacher, came on board. Ms. Singerland had used the Write A Play! Curriculum in the past and was eager to have the opportunity to work with a professional playwright to further nurture the imaginations of her students.

The next step was completing the application, which meant the collaborators had to agree on the answers to several questions: Who is on the project team? What is the

title of the project? What are the timeline and the budget? Next, the project had to be outlined, with goals and outcomes explained. Of course, the project had to demonstrate a correlation to the New York State Curriculum Standards, and prove that the partnership would also involve parents and community members at large.

We received notification in December 2009 that the Queens Council on the Arts we were awarded a grant partnership with The Renaissance Charter School. Then, a planning meeting was scheduled to review goals and objectives with the team, including workshop leader Jason Williamson, and we got to put our plans into action.

Through the grant partnership students learned to create their own plays. Slingerland “loves the curriculum and the creativity it bring out in students.” One wrote that “Young Playwrights is a thorough hands-on experience for novice playwrighters [sic].” The only downside is that we didn’t have more time to spend with the sixth grade writers, but our hope is that we have planted seeds that will continue to grow. Slingerland felt that “the workshop has inspired students to continue developing their plays and working on their story ideas.”

If you know of a school or organization interested in partnering with Young Playwrights Inc. on a grant to bring the Write A Play! Curriculum to young writers, please contact us!

Where There is a Will, There is a Way: Grant Partnerships bring Workshops to Schools

Alumni SpotlightThe first thing I can remember writing for Advanced Playwriting Workshop—a dialogue—centered around an aggressive orphanage-owner and a small boy running around in one of her dresses. Some marginally amusing insults were hurled, the child continued to run around in the dress, and nothing else really happened. (The end.)

This is where I was coming from.

As a freshman in high school I generally felt—albeit perhaps subconsciously—like I knew something about something, and yet I was constantly lost. Playwriting was no exception. I had written other plays before, it was fun, I had heard about “character” and “plot” before, I knew I knew at least something about what I was doing (which is perhaps true, as I still find the orphan-in-a-dress scenario somehow funny). But when it came down to literal writing, the ideas always seemed to spiral out of control, or go nowhere, or, quite often, both. It was as if I had some detached, nebulous concept of these playwriting tools—“setting,” “structure,” “theatricality”—but had never really made them my own, figuring out what specifically they meant for me.

All this is to say that the Advanced Playwriting Workshop has, over the past four years, given me an opportunity to experiment, to take risks, in order to at least begin to really own these ideas. For (like theater!) the Advanced Playwriting Workshop is ultimately about space. It is a safe space, it is a sacred space, and it is a constant space. This is how Young Playwrights Inc. sets it up, and, year after year, this is exactly how my classmates—my peers, my friends—have embraced it. The Advanced Playwriting Workshop makes it safe to learn by doing without having to worry about consequences for “failure.” Simply put, it provides the very Deweyan essence of an education.And so, surrounded by an entire group of people who were just as passionate about theater as I was, within an organization entirely committed to developing theater by people my age, I developed (after realizing I didn’t really know what I was doing), over the course of the past four years (nothing like continuous activity to cement knowledge) a renewed sense of confidence in my writing and myself.

I think most of what I know now about plays and playwriting—and even more broadly, about writing and life in general—I learned either through or as a result of the Advanced Playwriting Workshop. I can’t tell you how much I’ve gotten out of it; there are simply too many great examples to name. (A playwriting lens can be surprisingly useful…)

I will say that the very last thing I wrote for Advanced Playwriting Workshop—a dialogue—wasn’t all that superficially different from the first one (basically a dismembered arm was involved, in lieu of a dress—don’t ask). Because I’ve begun to effectively intuit many of the tools for crafting what to me is a potentially “good” play, though—now I can see what I’m really writing.

Ben’s bio is available in our Writer’s Block Section.

By: Ben Ellentuck

HappeningsYelena Elkind (YPF01) just received her MA in Teaching Literature from Bard College. She now teaches playwriting to students grades 2-8 at a summer program in Brooklyn. Halley Feiffer (YPF04) recently developed the play How to Make Friends and then Kill them with the Orchard Project in Hunter, NY and it will be read at the Rattlestick Theatre in September. She also has a short play being published in the anthology Shorter, Faster, Funnier. MJ Halberstadt (YPF09) recently graduated from Emerson College, where he recently produced a play series, and won a Best New Play award for his play Lethologica. He is the first recipient of Stage Source’s Jack Welch scholarship.

Anne Harris (YPF84) recently completed her PhD in arts education and is teaching at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. David Largman Murray (WC03) will be attending USC’s MFA Writing for Film and Television Program. He has also been busy writing scripts, a new musical and a celebrity gossip blog. Charlie Schulman (YPF83/85) was named the 2010 Walton Fellow at Arena Stage, and is preparing for the World Premier of Character Assassins at NJ Rep. Also, his musical My American Family was recently presented at American University.

Marissa Skudlarek (YPC06) will be having her San Francisco debut when her play Drinking for Two is produced in the Pint-Sized Plays Festival this August. Michael Trottier (YPF09) won the Blank Theatre Young Playwrights competition with his play Oliver and Hannah. Deborah Yarchun (WC04, YPF06)’s play Next Year in Jerusalem was performed at site-specific spaces The Crooked Tree Cafe and Holiday Cocktail Lounge in the East Village in July. Her one-act play On Gonoga Falls has been offered publication in The Best of New Play Project to be published through Peculiar Pages in September.

Kate Moira Ryan (YPF85), Robert Kerr (YPF88/89), and Madeleine George (YPF93/94) served on the Selection Committee for the Young Playwrights Inc. National Competition this past year.

STAFF

SHERI M. GOLDHIRSCHARTISTIC DIRECTOR

FRANCES MCGARRYDIRECTOR OF INSTRUCTION

AMANDA JUNCOEXECUTIVE ASSOCIATEMARKETING MANAGER

ELIZABETH BOJSZALITERARY MANAGERWORDPLAY EDITOR

NICOLE LORENZETTIEDUCATION PROJECT

MANAGER

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

JANET BRENNER PRESIDENT

STEPHEN SONDHEIM EXECUTIVE VP

ALFRED UHRY CHAIRMAN EMERITUS

CARLA ALLEYNECAROL EVANS

SHERI M. GOLDHIRSCHMURRAY HORWITZ

DAVID HENRY HWANG JULIA JARCHO

JOHN MCNAMARALOIS ROBBINSELLEN STARR

GEORGE C. WOLFE

Can’t place the playwright with the play? Visit the alumni section of our website for a full list of participants and their plays. www.youngplaywrights.org

Young Playw

rights Inc. F

OU

ND

ED

IN 1981 B

Y S

TE

PH

EN

SO

ND

HE

IM

PO

ST OFFIC

E BO

X 5134 NE

W Y

OR

K, NY

10185