III. CityTalk Story January 4, 2002
Alex Levy, photo by C.T. Assaf
GIVING YOUNG WRITERS A START
By Tom Valeo
January 4, 2002
In 1994, at the end of his junior year in high school, Alex Levy heard about Gallery 37, a summer program sponsored by the city of Chicago. The program provides a small payment to Chicago high-school students to spend eight weeks at the vacant Block 37 in the heart of the Loop, studying painting, sculpture, music and other art forms, including playwriting.
"I had gone to plays, but I knew nothing about theater," says Levy, 25. "But spending the summer getting paid to write sounded like a pretty good thing to do."
He applied and was accepted, and when school ended he began attending a playwriting class that met at the School of the Art Institute rather than at Block 37.
He wrote a play titled Scout's Honor, a comedy about two teenagers anxiously planning their first date. When school began, he submitted his play to the Young Playwrights' Festival sponsored each year by Pegasus Players, an ambitious theater company that operates out of Truman College.
Levy's play was one of four selected that year for a full production at Pegasus, and the experience of seeing actors on a stage speaking lines he had written changed his life.
"It made me think about doing this for a living," says Levy. "The feeling was incredible. The play was so well done I felt the characters on the stage were the same characters I had imagined. And I felt glad I wrote a comedy because I could hear the audience react to the show. Every time they laughed it sort of sent a chill down my spine."
Today Levy works as the associate artistic director for Pegasus Players and spends a great deal of his time working with high-school students competing in the Young Playwrights' Festival, which begins Jan. 4 at the O'Rourke Center for the Performing Arts at Truman College. He helped sift through the 511 submissions from about 70 Chicago high schools the most in the 15-year history of the festival. He also is directing one of the winners, Free Will, which, like his own submission seven years ago, is a comedy about two anxious teenagers, written by a graduate of the Gallery 37 program.
"The play deals with the creative process," says Levy, who has been working closely with the author, Ruth M. Martin. "It's a very mature piece. It amazes me I've been involved with the program for six or seven years now, and each year the plays get better and better. That's a source of pride for us. It makes us feel we're getting better and better at teaching."
Levy isn't the only past winner whose life was altered by having a play produced at the Young Playwrights' Festival. Marvin McAllister, a Ph.D. student in theater at Northwestern University who had won the festival several years earlier, taught at Gallery 37 the year Levy participated. Today McAllister teaches theater at the City University of New York's Graduate Center.
In 1990, when she was a 14-year-old sophomore at Morgan Park High School, Nilwona Nowlin became one of the youngest participants to win the festival. Her play, Seeing It Her Way the first she ever wrote was a comedy in which characters reversed male and female roles. Today, Nowlin, 26, is a fifth-grade teacher who eagerly gives students creative-writing assignments.
"I have my students put on skits to help them better understand subjects like math and science," says Nowlin, who studied theater, music and fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. She helped judge this year's festival, and, as a volunteer at a youth shelter, she has brought teenagers to several festivals.
Ron Olson, a 1988 winner, has applied some of the writing skills he developed to his job as a software developer for a New York-based computer firm. "The Young Playwrights' Festival really set the tone for everything I've done since," says Olson, 31. "Software seems utilitarian, but it's a creative process. The important thing is the message. When I'm writing a piece of software, I approach it as if I'm structuring a play."
Winning the festival, Olson says, "made me realize that you can have an impact on people's lives for one evening in the theater, or for a few seconds with software."
Olson, a graduate of St. Ignatius High School, wrote a satiric musical, The Times They Were a Changing, about the scandals of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. He believes that his award-winning musical and the positive reviews it received got him into New York University's dramatic writing program.
In 1993 LaTisha Hester-Franklin won the Young Playwrights' Festival with My-Self or Myself, a complex play about an interracial relationship she wrote with Spencer Gould, a fellow student, at Olive-Harvey Middle College in Chicago. After graduating from Alabama A&M University, Hester-Franklin worked as an administrative assistant in the corporate sector. Now the mother of two small children, she runs a private day-care center that promotes storytelling.
"I'm an avid reader," says Hester-Franklin, 25. "I always loved the language and enjoyed changing the endings of novels. I write for enjoyment. As a mother, I'm keeping a journal with my personal reflections on my children. I would like to give these journals as gifts to them when they turn 18 years old."
Like Levy, Hester-Franklin was deeply moved by seeing her play come to life. "When you write something and it's put on a stage, it makes you realize that it will outlast you," she says. "It makes you aware that the words you write have life."
Of the 60 winners over 15 years, half are engaged in careers related to theater or writing. Most of the others are in education or high-tech jobs.
"[Winning] puts them on a strong academic track," Levy says. "Some didn't intend to go to college but did. Some took a step up in terms of the college they went to."
Arlene Crewdson, founder and executive director of Pegasus Players, believes that winners take their ability more seriously than others.
"All of the winners we have tracked have gone on to college," she says. "They may not be playwrights, but many of them work in education or are involved in youth outreach."
She also believes the festival helps those who don't win.
"I've noticed over the years that the plays are better written, which I believe is the result of offering a continual program in the schools especially in schools with limited resources ."
Lucia Mauro contributed to this article.