Aiyana White ’14 was announced as the winner of The Blank Theatre Company’s Young Playwrights Festival, which received over 250 nationwide submissions this year.
White’s play “Barophobia,” will receive a professional production at The Blank Theatre in Hollywood in June.
White’s play focuses on the interaction between four strangers who meet in an airport and discuss their personal fears.
“I decided I wanted to write a play that included the sentence, ‘When a child screams for his mother because there’s a monster in the closet, what does the mother say? Go back to sleep.’”
The Young Playwrights Festival is a competition where writers under the age of 19 can submit up to three plays of any content.
Rebecca Katz ’15, Hannah Dains ’16, Kenneth Noble ’16 and Enya Huang ’15 were selected as semifinalists.
Katz’s play, “American Pie,” was inspired by “Friday Night Lights,” and covers the story of an adolescent boy and girl who become friends through their town, football and life dreams.
“It’s a commentary on the south in the ’80s and racial congregation and kind of about how even really different people can form lasting connections,” Katz said. “It’s an incredible honor to even be selected as a semifinalist. Play writing has recently become one of my passions, and I’m lucky to be able to be part of a group with such talented people.”
Huang wrote about four characters with their own individual problems under a totalitarian government in her play “Remembering.”
The story concludes with the appearance of a fifth character who ties the story together.
Huang’s was the only one of the plays that did not receive a student production at the Harvard-Westlake Playwright’s Festival.
“One of the writers that made the semifinals at this festival is a play we are not producing as part of our Playwright’s Festival 2014,” Moore wrote in an email to the Playwright’s Festival contestants. “I love to hear that because it reinforces what I always say, ‘our H-W Festival is just one festival/competition you all should be submitting your work to.’”
“It was very rewarding because the play had been so personal, and the fact that someone liked it was extremely exciting,” Huang said.
“Fireborn,” Noble’s play, tells the story of a man in 1969 Ireland who faces moral dilemmas when his relationships with his romantic partner, brother and religon come into conflict.
Dains’ play is told in monologues by the survivors of a bridge collapse. No one knows exactly why the bridge collapsed. At the end of her play, it is revealed that a girl removed a bolt from the side of the bridge in her attempt to jump off.