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Peer Reviews The 2009 Young Playwrights Festival An annual festival of new plays Reviewed by Cristina Martin Entire contents copyright © 2009, Cristina Martin. All rights reserved.
It was a distinct privilege to attend this year's opening night of the annual Young Playwrights Festival at Walden Theatre. The seven short plays featured were being performed formally before an audience for the very first time, and the anticipation and excitement in the air were palpable. Each play represented the culmination of months of hard work on the part of a talented group of playwrights of high-school age and younger, most of whom seemed to be gathered in the two rows in front of me with their peers. Their unpretentious passion for theatre was obvious and their exuberance contagious. (Overheard: "We had to listen to a fifteen page monologue in Charlie's class the other day! It was amazing!!!") I found myself almost wishing I were twenty years younger and a student at Walden. We can never step into the same river twice, however, and because time and experience alter our perspective and memory can play tricks, it's impossible to know really what it's like to be seventeen again. Nonetheless, Walden's young playwrights and actors articulate their particular reality so well that audience members of every age are able to get very close. The Science Project and Angel, both by seventh grader Clara Burton, deal with relationships and contain poignant portrayals of nascent attraction, awkward self-consciousness, and heartache. In The Science Project, the first play to be performed, Katie Younkie and Brian Wolf, playing study partners Anna and Tyler, tended to speak a bit too fast; their delivery slowed and became clearer as time went on, however. Younkie (who no doubt is lovely in real life) was very convincing in the role of a spoiled brat, a feat she repeated later and to even greater effect in Calvin Barron's The Wave. The Wave is a study in differing temperaments, contrasting the snooty, demanding Stacy (Younkie) with the dreamy, cautious Polly (Molly Kaviar). Both are interested in Jimmy (Aaron Morris), who is exploring all kinds of possibilities according to his whims and doesn't know quite what he wants. Barron does well in showing the complexity behind his characters, especially Polly. I'd venture to say most of us have known real people much like these, or could easily imagine them existing. Frat-Trees, by Eliot Zellers, presents a college scenario with a dark twist. Ali Burch gave a standout performance as Melissa, a young woman at once seething with anger and vulnerable. As her current boyfriend, Raymond, Mitchell Martin was casual and funny, and as her ex-boyfriend, Nathan Kaplin was so cruel he made the audience cringe. Amidst the intensity, there is one scene in which Melissa and Raymond, high on the drug Adderall, launch into the most hilarious string of absurd non-sequiturs imaginable. Not that drug use is particularly glorified; it's simply presented as an occasional element of college life. While the above plays seem to stay more or less within the predictable bounds of adolescent experience, the remainder take on situations sometimes so painful that I pray these young playwrights never experience them except in their imaginations. Clara Burton injects tragedy into the relationship between Zach (Aaron Morris) and Alex (Kyra Riley) in her second play, Angel, which we might be tempted to see as melodrama if it weren't acted with the utmost sincerity by all four actors involved, especially Morris and Riley. The same might be said of Bridges, by Rina Perlin, which treats the loss of a child in the Minneapolis bridge collapse of 2007. Emphasizing the little girl's words as recollected by her father, Nick (Brian Wolf), Perlin highlights the striking profundity with which the very young sometimes surprise us. A very difficult subject is tackled by Alex Masterson in April Showers as well. In this moving play about a journalist named Josh (Mitchell Martin) who is haunted by the atrocities he has seen and heard about while on assignment in Rwanda, Masterson draws attention to the unspeakable horror of genocide and suggests that it cannot be ignored by anyone with even an ounce of humanity inside. As Valentine, the ghostly girl of Josh's disturbing memories, Kyra Riley floats about Martin with arresting grace and solemnity. Ian Jackson's Lauriel stands out as a modern-day reworking of the myth of Orpheus with a nod to Oedipus along the way. Jackson has certainly done his homework, and by outfitting the inhabitants of the Underworld with Greek masks, he brings us back to the ancient origins of theatre. Because of the distancing effect of the masks, this play is experienced somewhat differently than the others and has a more formalistic tone, though it is no less successful as stagecraft. The minimal set for all seven plays, designed by Alec Volz and Hank Willenbrink, is versatile and extremely creative; an open suitcase(!) in The Science Project suggests a library window or maybe a study carrel while also holding props, and a rudimentary scaffold-type structure serves variously throughout all of the plays as a promontory, the gates to the Underworld, and a closet. Artistic Director Charlie Sexton and all of the instructors and staff who make Walden Theatre what it is can be extraordinarily proud of their young playwrights and of all the students whose work was evident in this year's Young Playwrights Festival. What a credit to our community to have such a conservatory, and what a resource for young people interested in theatre! As we know, these young people are our future. I can say with confidence that the future looks bright.
The 2009 Young Playwrights Festival Walden Theatre
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