Young Playwrights Festival Strikes Gold in Chicago High Schools

Arming each new generation with a viable education will always be the overriding mission of our schools.  While fulfilling that goal, schools influence another important objective.  They help prepare students to become engaged, responsible and competent adults.  By any measure, the scale of just one of these goals is massive.  Combined, they are daunting.  A project that began nearly four decades ago shows how the arts are contributing to the achievement of both.

Young Playwrights Festival (YPF), an in-school program receiving substantial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, helps students strengthen literacy and achieve developmental maturity through the creative process.  By teaching them how to use playwriting techniques to complement their teaching arsenals in high schools, YPF begins by educating the educators.   An intense in-depth endeavor, the initiative then enlists the expertise of professional playwrights to help students bolster their approach to critical thinking, improve writing skills, refine the way they make decisions and ultimately gain and build self-confidence.  At program’s end, students submit one-act plays in competition.   Four winning plays are then staged and performed by professional directors and actors. 

The 37^th Young Playwrights Festival running through January 27th at Chicago Dramatist displays the culmination of last year’s arts and education collaboration.  The high quality and broad variety of the plays in this year’s festival were only slightly surprising.  Youthful creativity, guided by the skill and experience of trained artisans, can and does reap beautiful harvests.  Brief video recorded statements from each winning student before their play was performed provided insight into the scope of their achievement.  Turning an idea into dialog, a plot and a message is something none of them had envisioned accomplishing before their introduction to YPF.  All four seemed genuinely taken aback that their plays had won the competition.  That surprise, juxtaposed with immediately seeing their creations performed, provided a useful context to measure their personal success and that of YPF. 

The lure of language inspired Amanda Heckler (Taft High School).  A fan of Netflix’s hit series Bridgerton and the way it mixes Regency era English with contemporary sensibilities, Heckler adapts the style to her own period piece, Splashes of Paint.  A quietly evolving love story, it tackles the confining strictures of etiquette and delves deeply into a young woman’s determination to defy gender norms and pursue her passion for painting.  Directed by Reshmi Hazra Rustebakke, Splashes of Paint maintains the kind of steady assured flow that centers the audience’s focus and allows the central character, Agnella (Aundria TraNay) to shine.  By staying consistently “in voice” and true to the playwright’s vision, TraNay as Agnella allows us to better appreciate the courage Heckler wrote into her character.

Tackling the intractable divide between the police and the Black community, Grant Parris’s Listen snaps us brusquely back into the present.  Two high school friends, one Black, one not; are caught in a repeating loop where police overstep and racial profiling are on vivid display.  Honest and disturbing, it represents both a truth and a fear.  Seth Hubbard as Graham, the Black student, possesses a natural ebullience that offsets some of Listen’s weight.  The banter he shares with his friend, Zach (Evan Morales), sparkles with the vitality of youth.  Laced with the practical concerns of survival, Listen also shows how easily people who are close can talk past one another on matters of race.  Through Listen, Parris (Whitney Young Magnet School) creates a powerful and sophisticated piece that shows how acutely the young process the world around them.

Can’t Sleep looks into the subconscious of a man who’s blocked out having been abandoned by his mother as a child; causing him to deny or unsee the truth of his current existence.  Alexander Loaiza (Thomas Kelly High School) handles his topic with mature sensitivity.  His protagonist, James (Ben Murphy), beams with an effervescence that proves to be a contrivance.  A tale that pierces into the way people find self-acceptance and growth, Loaiza confides the mood and tenor of his play may be manifestations of his own feelings during the pandemic.  As happens here, creativity and catharsis often come together to make compelling art.  Working with a supportive teaching staff and YPF enabled a young writer to give it form. 

Despite its grim overtones, You’re Like, Dead is quite intentionally and very successfully a comedic effort by Ella Johnson (Whitney Young Magnet School).  Killed at a bus stop, Richard (William A.S. Rose II) may get a second chance at life if he can give Death (Hadar Zusman) the name of one person who liked him when he was alive.  He learns that no one actually did.  Johnson’s story then becomes a puckish duel that morphs into an alliance between Death, who presents as a snarky rebellious teen, and mortality.  Astute, tight and wonderfully acted, You’re Like, Dead employs humor to show the wonderful contributions program’s like YPF can make to what students are able to accomplish.

These four plays, burnished and polished for public display, are their own tributes to how the arts and education empower one another.  Together, they breath life into a slew of human emotions to tell stories that amuse, delight and provoke. An ideal formula for making very gratifying theater.

37^th Annual Young Playwrights Festival

Through January 27^th

Chicago Dramatists

798 N. Aberdeen

Chicago, IL  60642

Ticket Info:  https://pegasustheatrechicago.org/productions/37th-young-playwrights-festival/