When Middletown resident Rob White heard about the Write On! Competition, he knew it was the perfect opportunity to share the heart-wrenching tale of a young boy he once taught. The 18-year-old boy is now in jail for allegedly driving while on drugs and with a gun in the car, but according to White, the school system is really at fault.
“The question,” White said, “is how did he arrive at that point?”
At Brewbakers on Wednesday afternoon, the sculptor/teacher was working on his third play of the week, but was struggling with the conclusion. With the help of Gabe Fries ’09, one of the organizers of the competition, he decided on a bitingly honest line: “His own people failed him. A social catastrophe.”
The Write On! Competition, inspired by Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days event, was organized by Matt Connolly ’09 and Gabe Fries ’09 and is open to University students and Middletown residents alike. Participants in the competition, which began on Monday and is continuing this week, are writing one play a day for a week. Brewbakers offered a space for participants to write, replete with free coffee and a student advisor to assist with their writing.
It may seem like a daunting task to write an entire play in one day, but playwrights are asked to keep their plays under five pages. In addition, one of the significant parts of the competition and of Parks’ exercise is the spontaneity involved in producing these plays.
“This project lets people let go of inhibition and create without holding back,” said Daphne Schmon ’09, an event coordinator for 365 Plays/365 Days who is also filming a documentary of all of the 365 events. “It’s simply not the same result as people who sit down for a year and perfect their work. This is raw, sudden, and immediate creativity.”
According to Fries, as of Wednesday, they had received between 50 and 60 plays, 17 or 18 per day. Fries and Connolly will choose five plays out of all of those submitted by Friday at midnight.
The 365 cast will then workshop the winning plays and perform them on Sunday. Chosen by an extensive audition process, the cast consists of Jennifer Celestin ’07, Carter Smith ’09, Maya Kazan ’09, Michael Chandler ’08, Jermaine Lewis ’09, and Garrett Larribas ’07. Jess Posner ’09 and Nikhil Melnechuk ’07 will be directing the plays, in addition to organizing various other 365 activities this week.
According to Fries, about three or four people have actually showed up to Brewbakers each day, although many more have been participating through e-mail.
Event organizers have also approached customers who happened to be in the coffee shop and asked them to write a play. Schmon tried to get a group of young Middletown residents to participate. At first they just laughed, but the competition eventually grabbed their interest.
“Next thing I know, Nikhil arrives with four blank note pads and thrusts them in front of the four high-schoolers,” Schmon said. “They felt embarrassed at first, saying they didn’t know how to write, but next thing we knew they are all intensely working at it.”
So far, the topics and styles of the submitted plays vary greatly.
“We’ve received some very abstract plays and some based on real-life events,” Fries said. “Many deal with events that really could only happen on a stage. In [one], a woman talks with her tuna sandwich.”
Drew Marvin-Smith ’08, who is participating in the competition, has used it as a way to experiment with play writing, since he usually writes poetry.
“I have not decided on any topics for the following three plays, but ‘Captain ADD’ and something about old people having sex in a retirement home are both possibilities,” Marvin-Smith said.
White spoke for many participants when he expressed his appreciation for the overarching philosophy behind the 365 events.
“I’m not just here to write plays,” White said. “I’m here with a mission.”
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