Young writers have a lot to say.
Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright and activist, wrote “A Raisin in the Sun,” widely considered amongst the greatest works of American drama, when she was 28. Scholars believe that William Shakespeare was only 25 when he wrote his first play “Henry VI, Part One.” And Shelagh Delaney, the British playwright, penned “A Taste of Honey” when she was just 19-years-old.
But at Syracuse Stage, during this year’s Young Playwrights Festival on April 30, audiences will have a chance to see work by artists even younger. In fact, these playwrights will not even have graduated from high school.
Now in its 25th year, the Young Playwrights Festival represents a unique opportunity for budding dramatists: The chance for their work – 10 minute, four character plays – to be shown on a professional stage, performed by students from the Syracuse University Department of Drama. And this year, an even more exciting prospect awaits those picked as finalists in the competition: Their works will be published and sold in an anthology produced by Syracuse Stage.
In Their Own Words
For Alethea Shirilan-Howlett, the Playwright’s Festival was a way to have her young voice heard, when others seemed not to be listening.
She submitted her first play for the festival, “Peeling Oranges,” under the guidance of her English teacher Matt Phillips, when she was a sophomore at Jamesville-Dewitt High school. Although that piece didn’t make it past the first round, Phillips encouraged Shirilan-Howlett to continue writing, and sure enough, her play, “Viewer Discretion Advised,” was featured in the festival the very next year.
In it, a high school student desperately tries to tell the adults in his life that the pressure to succeed–ace the test, get into college, make something of himself–is becoming too much; that the kids are very much not alright. But his cries for help are stifled by bright sitcom lights, the cheery sarcasm of his family, and the incessant laugh track that plays over the characters’ corny punchlines.
For Shirilan-Howlett, the play was a way to deal with very real issues she and her peers were facing. The year she wrote “Viewer Discretion Advised,” a young person in the community had taken their own life, and she found the lack of response from administration distressing, especially as she and other students were in need of mental health support.
“It kind of felt like asking for those things was just like talking to a wall,” she said. “And so I wrote this play that was kind of like a sitcom, where there’s this one character that’s crying out for help, and the other two characters, his mom and uncle, are telling him to just basically shut up while smiling.”
Phillips could tell right away, after reading the piece, that Shirilan-Howlett had written something special: “She really understood the transformative power of theatre and how it can change lives and raise awareness,” he said.
Kate Laissle, director of education at Syracuse Stage and coordinator for the Young Playwrights Festival, remembers reading “Viewer Discretion Advised” and being impressed by its dramatic tautness, and with Shirilan-Howlett’s ability to make the breakneck turn from farce to surrealist drama in only 10 minutes. “It felt like an overtightened piano wire,” she said.
That feeling running beneath “Viewer Discretion Advised,” of a ubiquitous mood being pointed at in-between the lines, is representative of the kind of work found in the Young Playwrights Festival, Laissle said. Over the years, she’s found that students are eerily good at expressing themselves through writing, and that their plays seemed tuned in to the world at large.
“I think these plays give us a more nuanced and direct insight into what high school students are thinking,” Laissle said. “Every year there ends up being a kind of theme that the students have selected through the cultural zeitgeist. Sometimes it’s funny, like they’ve been watching too much ‘Black Mirror.’ Or sometimes it’s talking about the pressures of society, like with COVID: A sense of loneliness, or the excitement of getting back with people.”
Phillips agreed that the work coming from the young playwrights is funny, insightful, and oftentimes staggeringly poignant, and added that the growth he sees from students that participate in the festival is particularly rewarding for him as a teacher: “They gain a lot of confidence. And then for some of them, it really sticks and they want to keep doing it,” he said.
10 Minutes, Endless Possibilities
Each season, Syracuse Stage receives hundreds of submissions for the Young Playwrights Festival. Applications for this year’s event are open until February 13. The rules are simple: Plays must not exceed 10 pages, and cannot feature more than four characters.
Because of the amount of submissions, any piece that doesn’t meet these parameters is disqualified; however Laissle sees these limitations not merely as contest requirements, but as a challenge for young dramatists to write leanly, and from the gut. She wants students to think broadly about what a “play” is, and encourages them to experiment with monologues, slam-poetry and any other style that might represent their voice, and the voices of their peers.
After submissions have closed, Laissle and a team of readers – Syracuse Stage staff members, and theatre professionals – narrow the pool of plays down into quarter finalists. That group of plays is read again, and 16 semi-finalists are chosen for a workshop at Syracuse Stage, which is to be held on March 2. There, the plays are read aloud by actors, and playwrights are given feedback, which can be incorporated into a rewrite before the plays are resubmitted for final review.
“It’s a lovely, joyous time,” Laissle said of the workshops. “And it’s a really communal moment, having all of these people in a room reading fresh, new, exciting work.”
Eight plays are then selected to be included in the festival, where they are directed and performed by students from the Syracuse University Department of Drama. The performance is open to the public, and often represents a student’s first time showcasing their own work in front of an audience. “It’s really an amazing night,” Laissle said.
A Springboard for the Future
Shirilan-Howlett is currently in her last year at the Syracuse University Department of Drama, where her senior thesis, “Pitsl: A Miracle Play,” had its premiere last December. That show, which blends Jewish folklore, modern social commentary, time-traveling radio transmissions and a talking puppet into a two-act family drama, is a real achievement for Shirilan-Howlett, who will spend the next semester in London where she hopes to intern with a theatre company.
Coincidentally, “Pitsl” features a playwriting contest (though the winner doesn’t get a chance to see their play performed at Syracuse Stage, but rather a lifetime supply of snake oil). No wonder, since for Shirilan-Howlett, the experience of Young Playwrights Festival was a solid foundation on which she’s continued to build, as her work has been featured in and awarded by other festivals throughout the country.
“I definitely learned that part of the revision process is to have people read it out loud,” she said. “Learning to hear when certain jokes land, or don’t land, to hear what makes people kind of hold their breath.”
Phillips wants teachers considering this year’s event for the first time to know that the team at Syracuse Stage has been nothing but supportive during his almost 15 years of working with the Young Playwrights Festival. He also encourages all students, even those not particularly dramatically inclined, to get involved; some of the best plays have been from kids that don’t typically lean towards theater as a study or hobby, he said. And even if a student doesn’t choose to pursue the arts after high school, Phillips has seen what a rewarding, and validating experience the festival can be: “For the rest of their life, they can look back on that and say: I was a playwright.”
For Laissle, the Young Playwrights Festival is of a piece with what she hopes to achieve with her time at Syracuse Stage: “The mission of the education department is to bring high quality art to young people, and this also happens to be high quality art done by young people. They are writing their truth and it is an honor to be able to be a part of that,” she said.
What Shirilan-Howett will do after she graduates is still up in the air, but one thing is for certain: She will continue to create, and carve out her own path using her own voice.
“I want to make art, and that could be in a lot of different forms. That could be becoming an arts educator or it could be, you know, writing plays that are seen by people off-Broadway. That’s what I’ve learned from being here. There are so many different ways that you can have a job in the arts. And your art can have an impact.”