Young playwrights | Arts & Entertainment

The Arts Campus at Willits shines the light on youth in the Roaring Fork Valley this week with two events. 

At 6 p.m. Tuesday, TACAW will host the Theater Masters’ Aspiring Playwrights Festival. At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, the same venue will be the scene of a winter concert by the Roaring Fork Youth Orchestra.

The events are free to the public. Reservations are encouraged at tacaw.org.

“We want every student in the valley to have meaningful experiences with the performing arts — whether through our school field trips, workshops, summer camps or young adult programs,” said Anna Feiss, education manager at TACAW. “Our goal is to inspire the next generation of artists, leaders and arts supporters who are essential to building a vibrant, thriving community.”

The playwrights program is in its 26th year and serves eighth- through 12th-graders at Aspen High School, Glenwood High School, Roaring Fork High School, Basalt High School and Basalt Middle School. Close to 100 students participated in the program and received personalized instruction.

Stephen Cedars is the program director of the playwrights program. He is based in New York and works remotely with the students. He came to the valley last week to work with them in person leading up to Tuesday’s event. The program has been growing steadily in participation.

“There are a few reasons I think the program has deepened over the past few years,” Cedars said. “First is a partnership with TACAW, which adds reach to audiences who otherwise might not know about the opportunity, as well as state-of-the-art technical capabilities. Second is an ever-increasing roster of schools we partner with. This is our first year partnering fully with Basalt Schools, and our first year including eighth-graders as well.”

Twenty-two plays will be read by adult actors on Tuesday night. Cedars said Tuesday’s performance not only will be a showcase for the plays but a unique theatrical event.

“It’s fast and loose and tonally diverse,” Cedars said. “It’s always a boatload of fun for us on stage and in the audience alike. It tends to attract repeat audiences who each year share how exciting it is to experience both the idiosyncrasies of young writers and the thematic overlaps between plays which illustrate the themes and questions that young people are confronting right now.”

Cedars said some common themes he sees in the students’ work include the cost of independence, retribution for the past, “sins of the father (and mother),” the power of community, a woman’s place in a patriarchal world and “a heavy dose of fun sprinkled throughout.”

Jimena Lovo-Rivas is a student at Basalt High School. Her play “A Little Giant Story” is the first play she’s ever written. 

“I have done various kinds of writing before this play such as writing essays in school, poetry and journaling on my own time, but this is my first play and it was a great experience,” she said.

Lovo-Rivas wrote her play for a younger audience. In “A Little Giant Story,” Big Brown Bear’s greediness and insecurity causes him to switch bodies with Big Black Bear and in so doing, a new friendship is made.

“I hope kids take away that being greedy is not good,” Lovo-Rivas said. “Instead, they should spread more love and kindness to the world, just like at the end of my play when both bears end up forming such a strong friendship that they call each other brother.  I hope people take away that every time you are greedy you are harming someone else, and that you will never know that until you are in their shoes, or should I say, inside their bodies.”

Lovo-Rivas said she learned that if you have a clear vision of your idea, the writing process becomes simpler. 

“I have learned that from a single thought, many other ideas form,” she said. “It’s like magic from this single thought. Many other ideas are created and start flowing at a rapid pace.”

Kinley Richmond attends Roaring Fork High School. She had never written a play before but has acted in them. She has enjoyed attending the theater since childhood.

Her play is called “Modern Hell,”  about a group of friends reading a book their late friend wrote for them that details what would happen to the world if climate change became more and more severe. The book begins to predict actual events. 

“Theater is a beautiful art form,” Richmond said.  “However, my general writing style tends to avoid dialogue so writing a play was incredibly hard, but enjoyable,” she said.

Richmond said she was looking forward to seeing the characters she created in her head performed on stage.

“Writing a play was far more difficult than I originally expected,” she said. “Creating a strong work of fiction is a far different experience than I previously imagined. I feel like I learned a lot about the art of playwriting. I’m really looking forward to seeing real people bring my play to life.”

Several participants in the playwrights program have gone on to work in the entertainment industry as adults, including Naomi McDougall Jones, who is a filmmaker and author, and Tyler Gruel, who is a working playwright in Chicago.

But Cedars said his goal is not so much to create professional writers but to expose students to the joy of writing and give them the opportunity to see their work performed live.

“I never think of this program as one that makes someone into a playwright,” he said. “What we really want is to give kids an opportunity they can’t otherwise have, the opportunity to see their thoughts and self-expression embodied by talented folks for an audience. More than that, to see their work alongside other kids, many of whom may live a valley away but are, on some level, their peers. I hope this is a memory that can pop up for them for the rest of their lives.”