"In one sense, it's disillusioning to see how hard theater is and how complicated it is," says Carolyn Jones, a winter in the Fifth Annual Young Playwrights Festival for her play Coup d'Etat. "What it takes to get here, get a job here. I'd never been on this side of everything before to see how it was done - aside from high school plays where it's pure chaos..."
Jones' play was selected last October from 716 entries. A formidable selection committee it was: Stephen Sondheim, Andre Bishop (artistic director-Playwrights Horizons), Christopher Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius and Beyond Therapy,) Jules Feiffer (Little Murders), Charles Fuller (A Soldier's Play), Ruth Goetz (The Heiress and The Immoralist), Micki Grant (Don't Bother Me I Can't Cope), Murray Horwitz (Ain't Misbehavin'), Mary Rodgers (Once Upon a Mattress), and Wender Wasserstein (Isn't It Romantic).
Prior to these readers, thirty-five theater professionals in a preselection committee narrowed the selection to twenty-five choices. "We like to be careful," says Richard Wolcott, program coordinator. "We don't want to miss a good play - so they're all read at least twice. Plus, all young authors receive a written critique of their play." All 700 of them? "All 716," Wolcott adds.
Significant Results
Initiated five years ago by Stephen Sondheim, whose musical Sunday in the Park with George was born at Playwrights Horizons, the festival boasts many awards and distinguished graduates. The festival itself was inspired by the Royal Court's Young Writer's Festival in London, which led Sondheim to launch something similar in the united States. Here, leading professional directors and actors are hired to produce three one-act plays by young authors, while three others are given staged readings. The productions are given a full run off-Broadway.
It was exciting for Evan Smith, who enjoyed successful reviews of his play Remedial English in the major New York newspapers. "Just seeing these professionals with their credits from Broadway and all over putting forth all this attention to your little play that you wrote in Savannah, Georgia, [makes it worthwhile]," reflects Smith, who was encouraged to change the setting of his play from Savannah to New York. The director and staff saw the work as having a universal feel to it and, after discussion, the locale and Southern accents were dropped in order to bring out that commonality.
The young authors feel they changed their plays very little for the New York production. Jones rewrote the ending of Coup d'Etat, and "didn't have any temper tantrums," she notes. Smith recalled, with some amusement, the first few rehearsals with his director, Ron Lagomarsino: "When we first started out, I thought who is this person and why is he doing all these weird things to my play? Very slowly, I saw that he was doing everything I wanted without me having to say a word. I thought, 'Hey, I've got a good director.' He finds the perfect way to tell an idea of mine to the cast so that they think they've done it themselves or feel they've thought of it on their own."
To be sure, the new plays receive expert handling. Coup d'Etat is set on an island ("St. Passis") and opens with a remarkable cacophony of sound colliding with the visual gag of a family
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