The Kids Are All Right

The Young Playwrights Showcase brings new plays to the stage and some lessons in life.

by BRIGITTA VON MESSLING

ccording to Muffin Dixon, an adult advisor at the Lucile Ewing Children’s Theatre, the Young Playwrights Showcase builds leadership skills and instills responsibility in its young participants. It’s also, says Dixon, on at least one occasion, been the scene of a miracle.

PHOTO BY ELVEN BLALOCK

Parker Ung and Brandon Katz

The annual Showcase, which this year runs from March 11th through 13th, throws all the work of putting on a play into the hands of the kids — and that means everything, from writing the plays and directing to readying the costumes and casting the parts. Dixon, who’s been with the program for 13 years (participating as a kid herself), says that her charges can’t help but learn something from the experience and points to one from a past production, a girl with a mile’s worth of bad attitude. So, against conventional wisdom, this girl was given the responsibility of a lead role, and after the experience, attests Dixon, the girl changed — and changed for the better.

“I feel like we gave her a start in the right direction,” says Dixon.

Every year the Children’s Theatre holds a playwriting contest where high-school students have a shot at seeing their work on stage. Usually the theatre receives about 12 to 15 submissions which are judged by a panel of theatre-community adults on content, originality, and producibility. (“Sometimes we receive great plays,” admits Dixon, “but they are just impossible to put on, on our stage — or for that matter on any other.”) The top three plays, each about 30 minutes in length, are then produced the following year during the theatre’s regular performance season.

Started in the mid-’80s, the Showcase sought to promote theatre, directing, acting, and playwriting in Memphis schools by allowing area teenagers to become involved in the development of a play. The most famous alum is one Willard Pugh, who had a role in The Color Purple.

The first-place winner of the 1998 playwright competition was Aboard Spaceship Zeg by Stephen Teague. The play is a comedy about a young boy abducted by aliens, who continually make fun of their human hostage.

Second-place winner Just that Little Silence, written by Emily Krech, is a thought-provoking drama about a girl’s relationship with her parents, and an opportunity for its author to show a young person’s perspective on today’s problems.

Roxy Alicea’s third-place winner, Love has a Face is a love story set in the 1800s about a man with a disfigured face who falls for an upper-class lady. The problem is not only the man’s physical unattractiveness but the woman’s love for someone else.

Calling the shots this year as directors are Kris Katz (17 years old), Billy Hoxie (18), Sarah Powell (15), and Adam Ferguson (15). “We were chosen because we do a lot around the theatre and have experience in performing plays,” explains Hoxie. Ferguson adds, “We have shown the staff that we are responsible and they trust us.”

Their efforts are entirely voluntary (though all of them entertained the thought of being paid), and Powell calculates that she regularly spends 6 to 10 hours a week in the theatre, depending on the production she is working on. Both Powell and Ferguson say they like directing better than acting.

When all is said and done, Dixon explains, the participants have learned a lot — enough to forsake peer pressure and make the best decisions for the good of the show One of this year’s playwrights, for example, is starring in another’s play for fear his own play’s director would be uncomfortable telling him what to do.

It’s that kind of lesson, Dixon says, that makes the Young Playwrights Showcase worth it every time.