Young Playwrights II: Coming Back for More

Lest you think that all I got out of last week's ninth annual Young Playwrights Festival at City Theatre was the joy of young talent and all that good stuff, I have to admit that the snazzy new scarf you may see me sporting was courtesy of American Eagle, which gave them to the student matinee audiences. So maybe that's a new theater rule: worm your way in with the student matinees, because you never know if there'll be freebies on offer.

Not that the YPWF needs extra inducements -- especially this year's best program, something new (as explained yesterday), an added bill of plays written by YPWF alumni. They were an invited group, but limited, I gather, to those still in high school here rather than those who've gone on to college. This new wrinkle in the YPF was funded by RAD -- our tax dollars doing something we can believe in.

The same ensemble of 10 was involved as in the middle and high school plays, so it's time to list the seven younger folks who joined the pros, Mertz, Connors and Dukes (see yesterday): Kenya Alexander (CMU), Frank Capello (CMU), Ashley Coney (Point Park), Dina Desmone (Point Park), Quantia Mali (Penn State grad), Peter Moses (CMU) and Lichelle Sade (Point Park). For these plays, the director was CMU's Anya Martin.

As I explained yesterday, the middle and high school plays were given readings. But for three plays the alumni got full staging (no costumes and just a few pieces of furniture for sets), with two readings added for good measure. Martin continued the practice of having stage directions and even some other authorial notes read aloud, for the full stagings as well as the readings. It all came in at about an hour and 50 minutes, a nice compact evening.

The readings were "Rarae Aves" by Hannah Trivilino (Mt. Lebanon HS) and "Miners: A Pittsburgh Story" by David Jimenez (Shadyside Academy). The first lost little by being read, since it's basically a dialogue between two disaffected young people, nerds, you might say, escaping the world on a hilltop, where they meet. He's a musician reduced to wedding singing, and she's escaping her life to commune with nature. The dialogue feels stilted, but actors Moses and Alexander provided natural life plus some comic eccentricity.

The "Miners," it turns out, are a Pittsburgh baseball team, worse than the Pirates but rallied by a gruff Hispanic skipper (Mertz) to a comeback win, proving that all we need is hope. What I most enjoyed was the use of the girls as a reactive crowd, and the way the director had everyone chime in with reactions, almost like an offstage chorus.

"Iron City Phoenix" by Laura and Rebecca Shute (Beaver HS) is about a young man (Moses) who has given up his art dreams. His old teacher tells him you're only as ordinary as you let yourself be, but he finds himself in a funk very late one night on the Clemente Bridge. There he sees a bent and elderly couple waxing romantic and poetic over the dawn -- and the play ends with him starting to sketch again. It's a little like a sermonette, perhaps, but it has feeling.

"Building Bridges" by Tessa Kaslewicz (CAPA) also finds its heroes down by the river. An 11 year-old boy (Capello) goes there to seek refuge from his angry father (Mertz), who's demanding almost to the point of abuse, and meets a homeless man (Dukes). Inevitably, this chance meeting ends up changing both the homeless man and the father, who finally opens up to his son and even admits to having loved art before his wife died. (Art as an alternative path that nurtures or signals personal development showed up several times in the YPWF.)

My favorite play of the festival was "No News Is Good News" by Margaret Saunders (Fox Chapel HS), all about a brainy new editor (Capello) of his high school paper, "The Buffalo Blowhorn," who gets a lot of attention but ruffles a lot of feathers, too. It's an energetic comedy in which a jock is discovered secretly writing poems in a bad English accent and the cheerleader is a secret rapper. And is this the play where the actor reading stage directions got actively involved, to great effect? Whatever, the play benefited from slyly funny acting by all concerned.

Considering that the whole three-show YPWF program, with eight readings and three stagings in all, was put on with relatively little rehearsal, it's a wonder the acting had as much invention as it did. It's great that school kids are writing plays, but it's also great to see our two major undergraduate theater programs turning out actors with such promise.

Next up: something on "Jersey Boys."