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felt like they had a way to deliver it,” said sophomore Truman Ruberti, one of the writers/actors. Should this be a traditional play? Should there be an ongoing plot? Should personal prose be amalgamated into character themes? That didn’t feel right either. (Trust the process.) “Your stories are the most compelling stories we have,” Scott told the cast. “Using them is the most authentic way to do this.” Someone brought up the idea of a school tour to anchor all of the performances in the play. With each destination on the tour, personal stories about race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexuality and academic pressure unfolded.
The venue is dark as junior Amani Garvin takes the stage for the first scene of A Shortage of Quotes. Amani is alone onstage with a single spotlight as she delivers a powerful soliloquy about the “Five Points of Identity” that people look for to draw quick conclusions about someone they meet: name, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion.
But the name Newark Academy isn’t uttered anywhere in the play and that’s by design. “We wanted it to feel more universal than that,” said Scott. The actors are clearly talking about life at an independent school but it could be any independent school. And one of the (few) rules that governed the writing process prohibited references to specific individuals in any of the scenes. One of the themes that kept coming up in the playwriting process was the idea of guilt for having the privileges that many students enjoy. “We tried to impart that no one should
OUTREACH spring 2014