Sunday, May 18, 2008
Last updated: Sunday May 18, 2008, EDT 12:41 PM
BY EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER
On Tuesday, the sophomore and junior performance arts students of the Bergen County Academies in Hackensack are taking a field trip to a student competition high on drama.They're heading to Kean University's Little Theatre to see professionally produced plays by two of their own, juniors Julie A. Earls of Paramus and Bennett Kirschner of Montvale. Earls and Kirschner are winners in the 25th annual New Jersey Young Playwrights Contest, run by the Playwrights Theatre of Madison.
For members of the school's theater program, this pilgrimage is an annual rite of passage – and, for some, inspiration. Earls, 17, remembers taking this trip last year, when she saw the award-winning work of two other Academies students.
"I was just kind of like, 'It'd be so cool if I could do that, too,' " she said. So she began making lists of ideas she could fashion into a script. One of those ideas turned into "The Moodring Monologues," being performed Tuesday.
The Bergen County Academies theater program is a bit of a star within the competition. In two of the previous three years, at least two of the four plays chosen in the high school category have come from its students. The pattern continued this year — and a third student, Brianna Delfs of Hillsdale, received honorable mention.
The reason for the school's repeated curtain calls?
"Good teacher," Delfs said, looking across the table at her playwriting teacher, William Hathaway.
"Good students!" Hathaway countered.
Hathaway worked individually with the 15 performance students in the junior class to create 20-page submissions. "The process is different with each of them," he said.
Like many theater students, Earls and Delfs entered the program because of their interest and talents in acting. They'd never written a play before. But playwriting is a required fall course at the Bergen County Academies for performance students.
"I felt like I went from a one-dimensional view of theater to a six-dimensional view," said Delfs, of writing a play. "It's just a huge leap, because all of a sudden all these possibilities of how I wanted something to be were there for me."
Delfs' play, "Some People Never Go Crazy (What Truly Horrible Lives They Must Lead)," is a freewheeling series of monologues performed by four unnamed characters in an existentialist, provocative style. "I kind of threw in everything that was me," she said.
Kirschner's play, "Sorry, Allie," was an earlier playwriting effort from sophomore year that he worked on with Hathaway in English class. It deals with a young man who is losing a close friend to cancer.
The budding playwrights, like many high school creative writers, drew inspiration from personal sources. Earls dramatized teen issues such as identity, unrequited love and parental divorce in a series of interlocking monologues. A monologue set to song in Delfs' play was inspired by someone she refers to as "a kid from my past" who has "had a big emotional impact on my life."
Kirschner's inspiration came from a specific personal encounter with a classmate, Aly Boden, who had lost a childhood friend to cancer.
"I had just been told of that, and I apologized to her," said Kirschner, 16. "And I felt like such an idiot. What consolation, what help does that provide to a person? So right afterwards I was rather annoyed with myself, and I wrote a monologue."
All of the playwriting students did readings in class as a part of the revision process but were not allowed to direct or act in their own plays – simulating the professional playwright's relationship with the production crew and cast.
The three honored students may or may not go on to write plays for professional production. What's certain is that the process has helped them become more complete as actors and theater artists.
"In the business, you have to know how to do a little of everything," Earls said.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
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