wordplay The Newsletter of Young Playwrights Inc
November 2012
Congrats 2012 National Winners Congratulations to this year’s eight winners of the Young Playwrights Inc. Playwriting Competition. They will be joining us in New York City for the annual Young Playwrights Conference in January 2013. The readings of the winning plays will take place Sunday, January 13th, Tuesday, January 15th, and Wednesday, January 16th at 7 pm in the Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street. If you’d like to attend the readings you can get your (free) tickets at:
the connection between love, admiration, and sacrifice is explored through the relationship between a man and a woman. Is it love, or is it entomology?
www.youngplaywrights.org/ypc.html
Tori Lassman, Brooklyn, NY for The Barn: In this intensely atmospheric
Anna Brenner, New York, NY for Tiger, Tiger: It’s much more complex
than boy meets girl in this drama about two friends obsessed with a popular girl at school.
play, a young man finds himself in the middle of a manhunt for a mysterious serial killer, led by a ruthless general with an army of minions at his command.
Abigail Carney, Grafton, OH for The Gloaming: An isolated homesteading
Conor LaRocque, Memphis, TN for Boots: In this dark comedy, a young
family braces themselves against another impossibly harsh winter. Their one-room house protects them somewhat from the outside elements, but forces confrontations within.
woman on a search for Mr. Right brings home her latest candidate to meet the family. Much to everyone’s surprise, this suitor wears a bowtie and has a penchant for milk and cookies.
Kaiyuh Cornberg, Fairbanks, AK for Bootlace Bridge: Two friends meet up
Daniel Stern, Baltimore, MD for Villanelle: Sibling rivalry doesn’t
to say goodbye before exceptional circumstances transform their lives. When they connect again everything will have changed— but just maybe they have made a bond that crosses all barriers.
even begin to describe the polarized relationship between these two sisters, one an artist and the other a doctor. When the one sister dons the mantle of the suffering artist in order to compose a poem, the other challenges her methods and talents through unflappable efficiency.
Catia Cunha, Rocky Point, NY for Legs (formerly titled The Last
M&M):
In
this
sparse
drama,
I. B. Hopkins, Gainesville, GA for South of Someplace: The heirs to
a crumbling southern dynasty must decide whether they will break with traditions that have been upheld by their families for generations.
The New Space By: Nick Gandiello If you were to follow a theater artist around for a week, you would often hear the word space: “Do we have space for rehearsal tonight?” “What an interesting space for a Chekhov play...” “Please do not bring food into the space!” “The space is sacred.” You would probably pick up on subtle differences in meaning in each use, and maybe some mystery in the word. The magic of theatre happens somewhere in that space everyone’s talking about... Here at Young Playwrights Inc, we are happy to welcome you into our new space: When you get off the elevator, vibrant red against fresh black and white paint will greet you. The bright white Young Playwrights Inc. logo shines on the wall. If you’re here to meet with a dramaturg or director, get some reading done, or work on some pages, take a right. You’ll enjoy the new, comfy chairs in the reception area. Maybe you’re here to rehearse or have a reading of your play. If so,
head to the brand new stage area. Theatrical glows from the track lights bounce off of the wooden floor. Curtains hang from the ceiling, providing a backstage area and entrance and exit routes for actors. If you’re in the Advanced Playwriting Workshop, this will be an ideal area to have a reading of your full-length play in its entirety. If you’re an alum, please, come rehearse here. And the Young Playwrights Inc. staff will greet you from behind their new, matching desks and equipment. It was a challenging, rewarding journey to these new surroundings. On the way, our staff and writers met in coffee shops and pizza places; they had rehearsals in rented studios and in spaces donated by others in the theater community. They had phone meetings and traded lots of e-mails. And they worked just as hard as ever. So, we are thrilled to have you in our new home, and look forward to filling it with your voices. But maybe our space is wherever our writers are learning, growing, and creating.
Many of you may recognize Nick’s name from previous Wordplay articles, from his work with our young writers, or even from his own artistic work as an up and coming playwright. While Nick has been a fixture here at Young Playwrights Inc. for several years, moving from intern, to script reader, to valued dramaturg, we couldn’t be more pleased to announce his new involvement with us as he fills the incredibly huge shoes of our outgoing Literary Manager, Elizabeth Bojsza. We could not be more thrilled to have him on the team. That said, fresh faces coming in also means friendly faces saying goodbye. It is with heavy heart that we see Elizabeth leave to begin something that we couldn’t be more excited for her to start - motherhood. All of us at Young Playwrights Inc. know that once she’s adjusted to her new life that she’ll be back sharing all of her passion, knowledge, and kindness with future young playwrights. Elizabeth, we will miss you dearly.
Talking With Two 2012 Write A Play! New York City Winners by Elizabeth Bojsza
Right before the 2012 Write a Play! New York City awards ceremony on June 13, Literary Manager Elizabeth Bojsza, had a chance to chat with one of the youngest and one of the oldest winning playwrights for this year: 10-yearold Gertie-Pearl Zwick-Schachter, who attends PS 9 Sarah Anderson School and won in the elementary division for her play, Hugo, and 17-year-old Max Friedlich, who is a senior at Friends Seminary, and won in the high school division for his play SleepOver.
EB: Do people assume that your
work is autobiographical? Max: Yeah, they do… I definitely used the play to work through things I was going through personally, so a lot of the situations are the same but a lot of the characters are different. The play is actually going to be at the Fringe in August and the director keeps calling me Matt, which is a little embarrassing. EB: That is a question I was going
EB: Right, Zeus, and he has to prove
to ask both of you: do you have any future plans for these plays? So Max just said his play is going to have a professional production. Do you have any plans to do anything with Hugo? Are you going to submit it to any another competitions or have it produced, Gertie?
himself to the other gods. How did you get interested in such a topic?
Gertie: I don’t think I am going to
EB: So, Gertie, you have had a lot of success with this play, Hugo,
which has to do with mythology. Hugo is the son of… Gertie: Zeus
Gertie:
Greek Mythology is really interesting to me, because I like how they are gods and they are immortal. And I had just read the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, so I thought the name Hugo, and I also really like the Percy Jackson series [which is about children of the Greek gods.] EB: And, Max, your play is framed
by the arrival and departure of an unwanted houseguest into the home of a struggling teenager and his single mom. Not to insinuate anything, but one of you characters in your play also has a name that starts with the letter M, [Matt]. Max: M.A. yeah.
enter it into any more contests, but I have a lot of really good ideas for other plays. EB: Can you give us a sneak peak
into one? Gertie:
These two girls fight the monster of mythology, Grendel, and they defeat him, but their enemy changes his name to the hero who was said to kill Grendel and takes all of the credit. EB: So you already have a twist
built in! Well I hope that when you finish that play you submit it to Young Playwrights Inc. Best of luck to you both, and thanks for taking the time to talk with me!
On the Future Most of you that follow our humble publication and receive messages from us have heard of last year’s fire, the recovery process that followed, and most recently about our excitement to open our doors on a newly remodeled space (that has been incredibly described by our incoming Literary Manager, Nick Gandiello). This kind of forward momentum and triumph over adversity would be reason enough to celebrate and look towards a strong future but we actually have even more exciting news to share: I am thrilled to announce that Tony Award-winning playwright, David Henry Hwang (Chinglish, M. Butterfly) has been named the new board president of Young Playwrights Inc. David asked us to share the following remarks with our faithful followers: “I’m honored to assume the Board Presidency of Young Playwrights Inc., following in the distinguished footsteps of founder Stephen Sondheim and previous leaders such as Alfred Uhry. YPI was built on a simple and powerful truth: that talent and love for theater are not constrained by age. Playwrights ages eighteen and under need a theatre of their own, where they can have access to professional experience and mentoring. In our current digital age, the experience of live theatre has become even more valuable, which makes YPI’s mission even more important. I look forward to working with YPI’s staff and board to help shape the future of the American Theatre.” Also new to the board is Barbara Wallner. She and David join me and returning members Janet Brenner, Murray Horwitz, Julia Jarcho, and John McNamara. We are so excited to be gearing up for 2013 with such motivated and invested leadership. Sheri Goldhirsch, Artistic Director
Save the Date! Coming Soon from Young Playwrights Inc. . . .
January 2
National Playwriting Competition Postmark Deadline
January 13-16 Young Playwrights Conference Reading Series March 1
Write A Play! NYC Competition Postmark Deadline
March 1
Urban Retreat Early Bird Application Postmark Deadline
April 20&21
Teacher Training Institute: Fundamentals
May 1
Urban Retreat Final Application Postmark Deadline
May National Competition Evaluations Sent Out
WB
riter’s lock
Give your character a clear goal.
Young Playwrights Inc.’s
Tips For Playwriting
Establish clear and consistent rules for the world of your play. The
great thing about being a writer is that you have creative control—in theatre you are the special person who puts pen to blank page (or types onto a blank screen as it were). You can make whatever you want to happen occur in your play. However, if you want your audience to enjoy the play and understand it, it helps to establish some rules for the world that you create and stick to them. Sometimes the world you create will look just like the world in which we live— other times the world you create can look quite different. Neither is any better than the other, but whatever you choose should be specific and consistent throughout. Create distinct voices character. When you
for
has a distinct voice, so should your characters. Think about how people talk in terms of their different relationships too—for example, your teenage character probably talks differently with his friends than he does when sitting with his strict parents at the dinner table. Letting each character talk through the words of his or her choosing will help them appear unique and real to your audience.
each
listen to people talk in everyday life, you may notice that people talk many different ways. Some are loud, some are quiet—some use big words, others practically grunt their way through life. Just as each person
Every character in your play exists for the purpose of telling your story. And each character should have a single, urgent goal that he or she is working towards. Make sure that that goal is something the character really cares about. Make it as difficult as possible for that character to accomplish that goal too—that is what will keep them at the edges of their seats! specific. If a character is walking, is he ambling, running, strutting or stumbling? Choose specific vocabulary that is the most descriptive as it can be and your readers will be able to clearly see the play in their minds. If a character is wearing a dress, what style is it—does it reveal a lot of skin or is it very conservative? The clearer you can be with your specifics, the clearer your characters and their choices will be to your audience. Be
Now, one CAN go too far with this. Make sure that the specifics you include are ones that are important and special to the action of your play. I don’t need to know what color shoelaces the villain is wearing unless he is stopped by the fashion police for it on page seven, for example. Let the unimportant details go and focus our attention on what really matters.
Alumni Spotlight An award winning playwright, Kate Moira Ryan has been the recipient of numerous fellowships most recently from Sundance Institute, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Center for International Theater Development. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, received her MFA from Columbia University and started her career with the Young Playwrights Festival. www.katemoiraryan.com
I have told this story so often that is has become part of the tapestry of my life. I was 15 when I wrote my first play. My father brought home a clipping from our local paper. The headline of the short article was WRITE A PLAY! I scanned it quickly and it was all about how Stephen Sondheim had brought Gerald Chapman over from the Royal Court Theater in London to start a young playwright’s festival. I was a writer from an early age. I spent my allowance on The New Yorker. I stayed up late at night to watch Dick Cavett interview the literary giants. I wanted to be George Plimpton, Janet Flanner and Mary MCarthy all rolled up into one. I had no desire to become a playwright. I had never been to the theater. I didn’t even know what a play looked like. The article stayed on my white painted desk in the room I shared with my sister. My father had strategically placed it next to manual portable typewriter from Sears that I had stolen from him. I ignored it as I sat writing the next installment of the story about two brothers I was working on for high school newspaper. My high school was a local parish school. My mother had gone there, my grandfather had help build the church connected to it. It was not a wealthy school and its graduates were geared more towards civil service than the arts, I was a reader and a dreamer and I wrote what I knew. And soon as my next installment of the two brothers appeared, guys who had never spoken to me before started telling me how much they liked my stories. The two brothers I wrote about were bred on the streets of Yonkers by a single mother. They were as far away from the world of George Plimpton that I could get. They were also what I knew. One of my fans had noted how much he liked the way the two brothers spoke. “It’s like they’re real.” And that’s what got me thinking. Plays have dialogue. So that afternoon, I took out a play from the library, Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates. I copied the format and adapted my story. I wrote non-stop for a week and then rolled a sheet of onion skin into typewriter and pecked, The Last Time We Remembered. Thirty years later, here I am I sometimes miss my portable typewriter with its unforgiving spool, but my father still reminds me about how he brought home that article. And that’s why I stay involved with Young Playwrights Inc. today. I like being that voice that says, “have you ever thought about writing a play?”
Happenings
STAFF SHERI M. GOLDHIRSCH ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Lucy Alibar (YPF01) wrote a movie that’s out in theaters now called “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and just got the 2012 Humanitas award for Screenwriting.
AMANDA JUNCO ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
Clarence Coo (YPF95) received the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize for Emerging Playwrights for Beautiful Province (Belle Province) and is a resident at New Dramatists.
ELIZABETH BOJSZA LITERARY MANAGER WORDPLAY EDITOR
Julia Jarcho (YPF01) and Madeleine George (YPF93&94) celebrated the implosion of 13P in September. You can view the story of how they produced 13 plays in seven years at 13P.org.
NICOLE LORENZETTI EDUCATION MANAGER
Martha Jane Kaufman (YPF03)‘s play Love Poems for Dead Bodies will kick off the {YOUR NAME HERE} Radical Acts Reading Series Oct. 17. The performance will be followed by a talkback moderated by Sara Ruhl.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Justin Kuritzkes (YPC10) had his play, An Autobiography About My Brother, produced as part of the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Dominic Mah (WC94) has a supernatural satire web series atwww.paranormalstatus.com and a blog at www.dommah.com. Max Posner (WC07) is the 2012 P73 Playwriting Fellow with Page 73 and his play, The Thing About Air Travel, had a reading at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer. Sarah Rebell (APW07) is in her final year pursuing a Masters at NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program and recently had a concert of original songs performed at the Laurie Beechman Theatre. She also produced an Obama fundraiser cabaret that took place in September. Kate Moira Ryan (YPF85) ‘s play OTMA was recently performed in Estonia. The Judy Show written with and performed by Judy Gold will have its West coast premiere at the Geffen Theater in LA, and Kate is the co-host of Hatched By 2 Chicks with Judy Gold on Sirus Out Q Radio.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM FOUNDER DAVID HENRY HWANG PRESIDENT JANET BRENNER SHERI M. GOLDHIRSCH MURRAY HORWITZ JULIA JARCHO JOHN MCNAMARA BARBARA WALLNER 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 Playwrights Inc. POST OFFICE BOX 5134 NEW YORK, NY 10185
FOUNDED IN 1981 BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM