YAWP Turns Out Playwrights Of The Future

At 17 years old, Eastport South Manor senior Ryan Little is a minor. And for no other reason than his age, he is banned from speaking up at the district’s Board of Education meetings about what has been bothering him lately.

But that roadblock wasn’t enough to slow Ryan. He refused to stay quiet.

The result: his original one-act play, “Controversy,” which tackles the slashing of arts funding in high schools around the nation, and locally here on the East End, head on.

“The plays, both plays, were cut from our school,” Ryan said. “That’s what really hit us home, because those were the most important things to all of us. I don’t know about other schools, but I know our Board of Ed doesn’t understand what it’s doing to us and what it is to us. This is our life. And that’s why I wrote my play.”

On Saturday night, December 10, Ryan and nine other high school students debuted their original plays at the third annual showcase for the Young American Writers Project (YAWP), a workshop hosted by Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA in Writing and Literature program. The event was held at the Avram Theatre on the Shinnecock Hills campus.

The YAWP playwriting program is a residency that begins in September and sends two instructors—who are usually professors or graduate students enrolled in the MFA program—into high school classrooms to guide students as they write two-actor plays over two months.

“In the end, what ends up on the stage, in terms of subject matter and the language, is the playwright’s call, just as it is in professional theater,” YAWP Executive Director Emma Walton Hamilton said before a dress rehearsal at the theater on Friday afternoon. “And what that means, especially at the high school level, is that there’s a lot of envelope pushing. The fact that it’s uncensored and edgy is what makes this program so great.”

This year, more than 130 students participated in the residency and the retreat program at the Stony Brook Southampton campus. The retreat is when the residency curriculum is compressed into just five days.

“I didn’t realize how important this program was until I actually came to it,” Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies senior Melany Mercedes said after

watching her play, “Little Marjorie Ain’t So Sweet, Huh?” come to life on Friday.

A YAWP veteran, Melany returned for the second time to the East End campus from the Bronx last month to participate in the retreat program. She learned after the first time around to keep her play short and to the point, she said. Her most recent work took her two days to write, but only after first writing a play that, to her, was less than thrilling, she said.

The takeaway from her final project, which tells the story of a popular boy dared to convince a nerdy girl to have sex with him, is “Play with fire and you’ll get burned,” she said.

“Think of a movie. Think of the jerk, something bad a jerk could do to a girl” she explained. “So I was like, ‘I need an ending where she actually gets back at him.’ That’s what I did.”

The other eight plays were written by: Gabby Cavanagh and James Allen of Southampton High School; Sam DePoto of Shelter Island High School; Holly Zappola and Matthew Frazier of Pierson High School; Augusta Greenbaum of Westhampton Beach High School; Tina Bozsik of the Ross School; and Ciena Quinn of Bridgehampton High School.

Every year, Ms. Hamilton and YAWP Program Director William Chandler see similar issues discussed in many of the play submissions, which is a reflection of what kids are talking about in the moment, they said. A number of plays in this cycle dealt with death and teen suicide, Ms. Hamilton reported.

But no matter the subject matter, the object is for students to discover their own voice, they said.

“Teachers might be discouraged to hear this, but I have more than once said, ‘Stop thinking so much,’” Mr. Chandler said following the dress rehearsal on Friday. “I’ve told students, ‘You’re thinking too much. Feel it. That’s really what’s important.’”

“We’re asking them to write from their hearts and their guts,” Ms. Hamilton added.

When Ciena was writing her play, “Sisters,” she had her two best friends—Ali Koral and Anika Hochstedler, who look as though they’re related—in mind to act out her protagonists, she explained in the theater during the dress rehearsal intermission.

“It’s important to have a good relationship with your sister, and that’s what my play talks about,” Ciena explained. “That and cancer and dance. Cancer really does take away not only daily activities but the things people love. Also, sickness can bring people together.”

In January, the same project will kick off in local middle schools for seventh and eighth graders, culminating with their own showcase at the Avram Theatre in March.

YAWP is funded by donors, foundations and local governments, as the school district fees do not cover the entire cost of the program.

By running this program in middle and high schools, it is a step that will help secure the existence of books and the people who read and write them, as well as playwrights and their future audiences, Ms. Hamilton said.

Ryan has the same goal, though he said he hopes to first bring back the arts to his school. He won’t turn 18 until April, so in the meantime, before he can legally address the Eastport South Manor Board of Education, he’s taking matters into his own hands.

He and his theater-mates are raising funds to put on their own play, he said. So far, they’ve gathered $41,000—just $9,000 away from their end goal of $50,000. While Ryan wants to end his senior year with a bang, he said he hopes the play will catch the Board of Education’s attention and stir up interest in the arts once again.

“Keep it up. Keep up the arts programs,” he said. “You can’t get rid of them, you really can’t. Because, like I wrote in my play, the world would become a dark, scary place without them. It does a lot for everybody. What if da Vinci never did art? What if Michelangelo never painted the Sistine Chapel? Think about it.”

For more information on YAWP, visit youngamericanwritersproject.com or the program’s YouTube channel to view the plays.