The school presented its annual New Play Festival in Rugby Theater from April 16-17. The event showcased 10 original plays from student writers who worked to develop their pieces over the first semester of this year. Student actors and directors then spent two months preparing to present the finished plays to the school community.
Performing Arts Teacher Sabrina Washburn said the festival gave students a chance to be involved in every aspect of the production with access to the advice of theater professionals.
“The New Play Festival is totally in the students’ hands, and we try to support them as much as possible,” Washburn said. “Each student director is given a professional mentor to work with throughout the process. They come to observe rehearsals, give students feedback and act as a person to bounce ideas off of. Some of the mentors are playwrights themselves, or they are alumni or adults I know through professional theater connections.”
James Corman ’27 said he was thankful for the opportunity to improve his playwriting skills with the help of theater professionals.
“The process of developing the plays was really rewarding,” Corman said. “We had multiple iterations of our plays, and we got feedback from Ms. Washburn. We also had the chance to learn from a professional dramaturg who taught us about the structure of a story and the tenets of playwriting. It’s a medium a lot of high schoolers don’t usually get to engage with, and I was lucky to have the chance to partake in this program.”
Washburn said each play improved throughout the editing process.
“We should release the first and second drafts of the plays for audience members to read, so everyone could see how far each work comes from point A to point Z,” Washburn said. “The playwrights revise again and again basically from September to January. It takes a lot of consideration for the writers because it’s very hard with artistic work to take feedback and apply it.”
Elliot Murphy ’27 said acting in the festival provided a different experience than her typical roles.
“In a musical or a play, your character goes through an arc of development and they become somewhat of a different person by the end,” Murphy said. “With the New Play Festival, the multiple characters I played were so starkly different. I was a protester in one show, an infomercial actor in another and an over-the-top actress in the third. Each role was so unique and interesting.”
Next year, the school theater company will present the New Play Festival in the winter instead of the spring, swapping slots with the school musical. The playwrights will condense their editing process to the months of September and October, with rehearsals in November and the final show in January.
Washburn said the shortened timeline will more accurately reflect the environment of a 24-hour play festival.
“It will have the feeling of a 24-hour play festival, where you meet the cast, connect with the writer and director and put the play up on stage by the end of the weekend,” Washburn said. “We will take bigger risks and maybe focus less on the details, but it will be very exciting to have a model closer to the ones that a lot of professional theaters use.”
