Rebecca Moretti ’13 won first place at the 2012 YouthPLAYS New Voices One-Act Competition for her play “Platform Nine” and will be awarded $200 as a cash prize.

Moretti wrote “Platform Nine” for the 2011 Harvard-Westlake Playwrights Festival.

The play centers on Adelie, a young girl who runs away from her prestigious East Coast boarding school to search for her birth mother in Los Angeles. On her way to California, Adelie meets Sonny, a street smart troublemaker who has escaped from his broken home in Los Angeles to pursue a career in New York. Despite their seemingly irreconcilable differences, the two teenagers form a connection that remains with them for the rest of their lives in spite of the brevity of their encounter.

The play is similar to a series of short stories Moretti had written in middle school that featured a girl and her brothers searching for their mother.

“I think that what I’m most interested in is this search for identity and where we all came from and belong in the world, which I think could be represented by the search for one’s mother,” Moretti said.

“Platform Nine” was also a winner of the 2011 Blank Theater Company’s Young Playwrights festival and was professionally produced at the Stella Adler Theater.

Ariel Winter from the television series “Modern Family” was cast as Adelie.

“It was awesome to have my play produced by the Blank Theater,” Moretti said. “I got to go to all the rehearsals with the directors and actors. It was cool because they asked for my input and opinions, and I really got to have a part in the production aspect.”

Though Moretti had written her play in less than a week, she went through a thorough editing process with Performing Arts teacher Chris Moore, English teacher Isaac Laskin and professional dramaturges.

“It’s important to get other people’s opinion, and I sent it to the people I trusted most,” Moretti said. “With the different feedback I got I reconsidered some parts and decided how to make the play better.”

Moretti said it was rewarding to sit in the theater and watch her play as a member of the audience.

“The thing I enjoyed most about the producing process was getting to see the play performed but also, more importantly. getting to see how the audience reacted,” Moretti said. “It is nice to sit with the audience and feel that your play has touched in some way.”