Young Playwrights Festival
When I was a reader for the Philadelphia young playwrights’ festival, I often blamed the plays’ sameness on the influence of television or on controlling teachers who wanted to use playwriting classes as consciousness-raising sessions, encouraging movie-of-the-week scenarios about teen pregnancy, drugs, and gang violence. The playwrights’ joy in the process didn’t make up for my disappointment in the plays’ comforting moralism. The teen playwrights employed cultural stereotypes with depressing regularity–everything seemed to be about cycles, cycles of gang violence, cycles of abuse. Pregnant daughters confronted their unwed mothers, violent boys faced their violent fathers, bullying schoolmates broke down to confess their broken homes.
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Of course, young writers are just saying what they think we want to hear–and maybe we do want to hear it. But somehow it seems worse when new rather than experienced writers stumble into prefab plodding. They don’t have to worry about building a career in a field that rewards plot cloning. I always hoped they might show us something different about ourselves and our storytelling. So it was with a mixture of dread and anticipation that I attended Pegasus Players’ 12th Annual Young Playwrights Festival–professional productions of 4 plays chosen from 410 submissions, the result of writing workshops and touring productions in Chicago’s middle and high schools.
This Is a Test: One Girl’s Fight With Cancer describes a different kind of survival, detailing seventh-grader Shenita Peterson’s recent medical problems. She wrote the script with Lorraine Bahena, La’Shay Evans, Irina Garduno, Steven Hatchet, Omolara Johnson, Elizabeth Lopez, and Diana Lozano, classmates at Washington Irving Elementary School. Nambi Kelley skillfully brings out the willful nuances of Peterson’s character, who narrates the story of her diagnosis, treatment, and surgery with a 13-year-old’s irreverent, sulky optimism. An inspired theatrical device gives the story a menacing rhythm and corrects any potential ignorance of medical terms: Peterson punctuates her journey with the spelling-bee-style recitation of words like “oncology” and “osteogenic sarcoma.” The green-coated doctors sitting in a watchful and supportive half-circle behind the action define, then repeat the medical conditions that threaten the girl’s life. Director Greg Kolack deserves a lot of credit for establishing a fast pace for Peterson’s grueling journey, but the story itself has its own winning energy. Survival for Peterson, at least in the play, means telling the truth, being a kid, and never succumbing to the stereotype of the shivering, weakened, but brave walking wounded.
