Philadelphia Young Playwrights celebrates 25th anniversary

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

“It’s not about the play. It’s about what happens to you when you write the play.”

Thelma Reese, then a teacher and educational psychologist, said she eventually had this “aha moment” about the inspiration of her friend Adele Magner that students — no matter how young, how poor, how jaded, how troubled, how bored — could transform their lives by writing plays.

Magner’s vision blossomed, with the help of Reese and others, when she founded Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which celebrated its 25th anniversary Tuesday night. Throughout its existence, the program has reached about 40,000 students, not to mention their teachers, teaching artists, and parents.

The students write about their world, and it frees them. Asa Carey, a 14-year-old 8th grader at Meade Elementary School in North Philadelphia, was this year’s winner of the Adele Magner Memorial Award. Magner died in 2000.

His play, I Forgive You, written when he was in the 7th grade, is about a boy who is bullied. He told the gathering of several hundred that his classmates listen to him now.

“I can express emotions through writing,” said Asa, who worked with teacher Lori Odum and teaching artist Dwight Wilkins. “Anybody has a voice.”

Each year, Young Playwrights works in about 50 schools in Philadelphia and the suburbs and holds a competition. The best plays are directed and performed professionally, an experience that can be transforming for students.

As Marsha Pincus, the former Gratz and Masterman teacher and Young Playwrights pioneer, once wrote: “By writing about their world, young people are seizing the power to change it.”

The program brings together everything that experts and reformers say is needed to improve achievement and opportunity for students: creativity, collaboration, writing, reading, literacy, exposure to the arts. Just about every theater group in the city is involved.

Young Playwrights’ most famous alumna is Quiara Alegria Hudes, a Central High grad who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her play Water by the Spoonful. She went from Central to Yale, then Brown University, where she was mentored by Paula Vogel, whose plays include the Pulitzer-winning How I Learned to Drive.

Both Hudes and Vogel attended the event, held at World Café Live in University City. As part of the anniversary celebration, Young Playwrights has launched the Paula Vogel Mentors Project, in which five playwrights, including Hudes, will work over the next three years with five promising student playwright fellows in producing new work.

Hudes introduced Vogel, who was genuinely honored and thrilled to be part of this. She had earlier in the day traveled to Benjamin Rush Arts Academy in the Northeast with Young Playwrights executive director Glen Knapp, where students who were reading How I Learned to Drive had launched a Twitter campaign to meet her. She shocked them by actually showing up.

Then Vogel told her own story: She was 15 years old, from a family that was falling apart, bored by school. Her mother and grandmother insisted that she take typing. She had no clue about her future when she wandered into a drama class that was rehearsing Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. The teacher asked if she wanted to be the stage manager.

She didn’t know what that was, but said yes.

“He saved my life,” she said of the teacher, Frank Anzalone, who was also at the event. “My grades went up, I went to college and graduate school. I saw there was a way forward and a way out.”

Pedro Ramos, who chairs the School Reform Commission and is a Young Playwrights fan, attended the celebration.

Ramos is struggling simply to keep the District financially solvent. Arts education is among what could be jettisoned as city and state politicians continue their political dance over whether money is available simply to open buildings called schools in September.

He was asked, “Why are transformative programs like this on the fringes available to only some students, while preparing for standardized tests drives the main curriculum?”

Ramos said, “This” — giving students voice through playwriting and other creative outlets — “should be a pedagogical strategy.”

It is not just about scaling up programs like Young Playwrights, although that would be nice, but about changing a mindset about the best ways to draw out students’ potential.

Maybe. Some day.