A Young Writer Branches Out And Discovers Playwriting

By Shannon Hicks

Emily Oliver does some writing every day. Usually it’s poetry, but her recent switch to playwriting has already caught notice.

Emily, a freshman at Newtown High School and a steady Honor Roll student, was recently named one of four winners of The Eighth Annual Young Connecticut Playwrights Festival, which included a $250 scholarship and one of this year’s four Gilda Anderson Fellowship Prize. Last month her play was performed as a professionally staged reading at Rich Forum in Stamford.

Gilda Anderson, the widow of the noted American playwright Maxwell Anderson, created the festival in 1982. Newtown resident Bruce Post is the producer of the festival and has been its executive director since 1995. The festival was created in part, Mr Post said recently, “as a response to a crisis we saw: If you don’t engage young people in theater, you won’t grow your next audience.”

Information about the festival is sent out to English and drama instructors in Connecticut and Westchester County in New York, inviting students between the ages of 12 and 18 to explore the idea of creating an original work to be staged.

Stamford TheatreWorks also sponsors playwriting workshops in a number of area schools, including Newtown High School. Mr Post and two others, Nancy Ponturo of Redding and Stacey Sweeden of Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., led this year’s workshops. Emily learned of the contest when Mr Post visited Newtown High School and worked with the school’s Creative Writing Club.

“This was an extremely prestigious thing for her to win,” said Lee Keylock, who co-leads the club with Caro Strand. “They’re up against serious competitors.” One of this year’s winners was a student at Yale School of Drama.

Young Connecticut Playwright Festival workshops were held in February and early March; submissions for this year’s festival competition were due by the first week of April.

This year’s festival saw between 40 and 50 submissions, said Mr Post, who screens the initial entries before passing them on to a panel of five judges.

Emily Oliver’s play, Subway Talk, made the cut and was read at Rich Forum on Friday, May 14.

Unfortunately Emily was not there to see it. During the school district’s April vacation, Emily was one of five students from the United States who had been handpicked by educators to travel to Florence, Italy, on an American Federation of Labor (AFL)-sponsored trip to a child labor law conference. (Emily and her best friend, NHS sophomore Annie Schneider, are the co-founders of A Global Voice, a student-run human rights group at the high school.)

Although Emily was not at the festival, she was well represented. Her immediate family — parents John and Pat, older brother John Joe and younger sister Mary — plus an aunt, cousins, a close family friend, and many of her friends from school attended the readings.

Both of her writing club advisors, Mr Keylock and Ms Strand, and several other teachers — some of whom do not even have Emily as a student — also made the trip to Stamford on May 14.

“They were all very supportive of my writing even when I am not around to support it myself,” Emily said this week. “I was amazed … at the dedication of the Newtown High School English department. If that isn’t a testament to what amazing teachers we have in Newtown, I don’t know what is.”

Subway Talk is about a journalist who writes a political column that is very edgy, and his topics seem to touch the nerves of many readers. The journalist, Joseph, doesn’t mean to cause so much trouble with his writing, explained Emily, but his topics make his editors very nervous.

“The columns don’t feed the demographic of the newspaper’s readers,” said Emily, “so he is given an extra project, a charity piece on a woman who is the reporter’s exact opposite. She purposely says things to get people riled. She says things to get attention, to get people talking. He cowers and does what he’s told.”

The woman, Marie, has been starting schools for women in impoverished countries.

“One of her schools gets blown up, and she almost gives up,” Emily continued. “Once things get hard, she gives up; she doesn’t have the courage of her convictions.

“The plot of Subway Talk is carried along through dialogue heard on subways,” she said, and it was while on a subway on her way home from Washington, D.C., a few months ago that Emily had her initial idea for her play. She was traveling home after participating in a Children’s World Congress event when the behavior of other fellow train passengers caught her attention.

“Everyone was talking on their cell phones, and no one is worried anymore about keeping their conversations private. They all wanted everyone to hear their personal agendas. They were almost embarrassingly pushing their agenda. They didn’t care who overheard them.”

“Her play is a lot about disillusionment,” said Bruce Post. “You’re talking about a young lady who’s already very well informed. There are some speeches in the play that belie a wisdom for someone her age.

“The other thing about Emily is she doesn’t preach,” Mr Post added. “She lets her audience think. She says ‘Here’s the story, here’s the picture, you think about it.’ She’s a very sophisticated young woman. All you have to do is hear her speak, and you know she’s more mature than most people her age.

“I think she’s the only 15-year-old I know who listens to NPR daily,” he added with a laugh. “Truly, she can’t live without it.”

The biggest challenge for Emily, who has written short stories and poetry for a number of years, was making her dialogue sound real.

“You have to craft your story different, but it was fun to do,” she said. “You use a different type of words than most other genres, of course, but I really enjoyed it.”

Emily was involved in every step of bringing her play to life. She attended auditions and watched as director Nancy Ponturo worked with the actors who would be doing the reading. The cast for Subway Talk included Matthew Shattuck as Joseph (the reporter); Harlon George as Tommy, a friend of Joseph’s who writes obits for the same newspaper; Don Striano as Senator Darcline, whom Emily describes as “the lesser of the two evils; of what’s left, he’s our guy”; Danielle Savin as Marie, the woman building the schools; and Robert Ponturo as The Homeless Man, a subway passenger who overhears everything that is going on.

The play runs about 40 minutes and received, said Mr Post, “very positive” audience reaction.

“There were certain things said where you could hear an intake of breath or murmurs in reaction to what was being said,” he said. “There were all those things a playwright wants to hear, that your play is being effective.”

The other plays that were read for this year’s festival were A Block Away by Keele Howard-Stone, Altered States of Marriage by Lauren D. Yee, and Genius by Chris Bannow.

 “I think everyone should hear about this festival and what these people are doing,” Emily said at her home recently. “Even if I hadn’t won this, I would be writing more plays. I like the way they tell stories.”