Young Playwrights Contest ready to change your life
Hey, shut-in literary kids! Want to put on a show? Good, because while schools are closed and nothing about student life is what it used to be, the 36th annual California Young Playwrights Contest is continuing as scheduled.
Let the theatrical learning experience begin.
The contest, which is run by the San Diego-based Playwrights Project, is accepting submissions of original, unpublished plays written by California residents ages 18 and under. The deadline is June 1. Scripts will be evaluated in two age groups (under 15 and 15 to 18), and as many as eight winning plays will produced by the Playwrights Project for the annual Plays By Young Writers festival.
The winners will be notified in October. The festival is scheduled for January. At this point, no one knows what the festival will look like — live? virtual? — but contest coordinator Rachael Vanwormer has a pretty good idea about what the winners’ experiences will feel like. Because in 2001, she was one of them.
“One of the huge benefits is that the playwrights are encouraged to be as involved as they want to be, and I came to everything I could,” the busy local actress and playwright said of her experience with “Funny,” which she wrote in her junior year at Hilltop High School in Chula Vista.
“For me, it was a crash course in not only how a script gets made, with
rewriting and table reads and feedback, but it was also a crash course in the professional rehearsal process. It was like jumping headfirst into the entire process all at once. It was very formative.”
The Young Playwrights Contest is a full-immersion introduction to every aspect of the page-to-stage experience. All of the submissions are evaluated without any identifying information on the playwrights by Vanwormer and a group of theater professionals, and contestants can request feedback on their scripts that they can use if they want to submit the script again.
The winning plays go through the workshop process, where the playwrights work with a dramaturge to revise their plays and get them ready for the public performances to follow. It is a rigorous process, where the fledgling playwrights learn how to take criticism to heart without taking it personally, and how to stand up for their creative visions without alienating the many people it takes to bring your script to life.
“For starters, my play was really long. We had to cut it down quite a bit. It was a wonderful lesson in being concise and narrowing
down the content to what has the most punch,” said Emily Midgley, who worked with dramaturge Aleta Barthell on her play “The Acquittal,” which was a Young Playwrights Contest winner in 2015.
When she wrote “The Acquittal,” which looks behind the benevolent mask of a deceptively cheerful futuristic society, Midgley was a 16-year-old junior at the Bishops School in La Jolla who thought she might want to be some sort of writer someday.
Now, she is a 21-year-old junior at Hamilton College in upstate New York, where she is majoring in theater and creative writing. In 2019, she had a summer internship with the La Jolla Playhouse. Earlier this year, she was one of three winners of Hamilton’s 2020 Wallace Bradley Johnson Prize for playwriting.
And at some point, Midgley could join Josefina López (“Real Women Have Curves”), Annie Weisman (“Be Aggressive”) and Lauren Yee (“Cambodian Rock Band”) on the list of Young Playwrights Contest winners whose plays have been performed at the La Jolla Playhouse, the South Coast Rep and on the big screen. It is certainly possible now.
“The people involved with this, I can’t describe how incredible they are,” said Midgley, who is sheltering
in place with her family in Carmel Valley. “If I were talking to someone who was wondering whether or not they should enter the contest, I would say if you get the chance, you should milk it for all it’s worth. It could change what you want to do with your life.”
Now in its 36th year, the Young Playwrights Contest is one of many Playwrights Projects programs designed to give a voice to people who are not always a part of the large civic conversation. In addition to the many youth programs, there are projects devoted to seniors, immigrants living in the U.S., foster youth, active military and veterans, and incarcerated adults and former offenders.
And when these writers speak up, the Playwrights Project is ready to listen.
“What I appreciate so much about the Playwrights Project is that they are there to facilitate other people’s stories,” Vanwormer said. “Young people tend to be dismissed, and the groundwork of the whole organization sprang from their desire to give young people a platform. That really resonates with me.”
For information about the California Young Playwrights Contest and tips for writing scripts, go to playwrightsproject.org.
karla.peterson@sduniontribune.com