It's May 12, 2001, two days till curtain, and the theater is abuzz. Cast and crew stream through the room. There's coffee—lots of coffee—and snacks in big bowls on a table. Three plays are being rehearsed in different rooms. A director requests music stands, the costumer checks to see whether the budget allows for pink sneakers, and the doorbell rings and rings: reporters, neighbors, local artists and theater staff.

Amidst the organized chaos, three girls move among the actors and stage staff. Patrice Cooper, 13, Rose Weill, 17, Emily Hawe, 18 are the playwrights, and their work is at the heart of all this activity.

This is the second rehearsal for the 2001 Student Playwrights Project, a program of the Arena Stage theater in Washington, DC. The program is part writing competition, part crash course in theater production. Students from the metro area submit plays for the annual contest; three are selected for performance on the main stage at Arena.

Rachel Grossman, associate director of education at Arena Stage, coordinates the program. "You get to see some really exciting new work being done," she says. "The quality of writing and the creativity in everything we see is unbelievably high."

Putting it All Together
Now in its second year, the Student Playwrights Project received works from 139 young writers in grades 3 to 12. A panel of judges—Arena Stage staff and a local professional theater artist—gave awards to 16 student playwrights for "excellence in writing and outstanding creativity," and selected three additional plays to be performed in Arena Stage's main theater on May 14, 2001.

"The judges look for quality of the writing. They're also looking for produceability, creativity, the types of issues the work grapples with, and what theatrical conceits the writers are or are not using," says Grossman.

Once the selection is made, the work—and the fun—begin.

Each play is assigned a director, who selects the professional cast and works with an assistant director and a professional dramaturg (expert on script and language) to shape the scripts into stage-ready plays.

The plays are very different, but the process of bringing them to the stage is the same in two key regards: the timeline is compressed, with only three meetings, or about 6 hours, of rehearsal before the performance, and the collaboration is intense.

"Student playwrights are present for all rehearsals, to partake in process as any new playwright would," says Grossman.

It's at rehearsal that these student works begin to take shape. Two of the plays deal with the trauma of domestic violence—one, Balancing Spoons by Emily Hawe, takes an oblique approach, while Patrice Cooper's The Long Search for Happiness is more direct. The third, Now We Are Seniors by Rose Weill, puts a Winnie-the-Pooh spin on the scramble to get into a top college.

Writing—and Rewriting
At 18, Emily Hawe already knows a little something about play production: her submission to last year's Student Playwrights Project was also selected for performance. Balancing Spoons has already been produced at her high school, St. Stephen's and St. Agnes' School in Alexandria, Virginia.

In the opening scene two young girls, Boo and Sue Ellen, are in the kitchen of Sue Ellen's house, eating ice cream. They talk, play games and compete at balancing spoons on their noses. Throughout, their dialogue is punctuated by T.V. news promos ("Stay tuned for Action News at 3:00, where we bring you the latest on police activity that has streets closed. How will it affect your commute?"). By mid-act, the audience learns that just beyond the kitchen doors, Sue Ellen's mother holds her violent stepfather at gunpoint.

Hawe says she rewrote the script nearly a dozen times before it was ready for the stage. As she did, a theme began to emerge: our tendency to focus on the trivial, often failing to recognize more significant matters.

Director Oran Sandel helps tease this out, making the most of the short rehearsal time to lead the cast through scene after scene, helping them think about the loaded meaning within the girls' childish banter. He stops the action frequently, asking Emily to weigh in on how she thinks it's going.

"It [is] such an incredible experience to be only 18 years old and sitting in a rehearsal for my play answering the questions asked by the director and actors about what I intended by this line or that action," says Hawe.

From Poetry to Performance
The three women in the cast of The Long Search for Happiness switch characters fluidly before our eyes: a desperate mother trying to hide her husband's abuse talks to a frustrated teacher, who morphs into a stern principal suggesting a call to social services, and then into a four-year-old cowering on the floor behind her mother.

Playwright Patrice Cooper, a middle-schooler at Options Public Charter School in DC, watches transfixed. It's easy to forget that there are no costumes, no props: an empty stage and a strong, lyrical script are enough to make the scene come alive.

The director, Naoko Maeshiba, stops the action for a moment. "Dad's angry because he was disobeyed," she says. "But how does the father know Mom wasn't at work?" The cast thinks about it, offers their ideas, then they all turn to Patrice to see how close they've come. She clears it up for them in a moment, they add a new line, and the show goes on.

The Long Search for Happiness, which began as a series of poems, has come alive during rehearsals. It is the story of Jasmine and her sister, young girls growing up with an abusive father. Throughout the play, Jasmine expresses herself through her poetry. Happiness, the girls learn as they grow into adults, is found in many places—family, community, faith, the heart.

Laughter as the Engine
Energy and laughter characterize the rehearsals for Now We Are Seniors. Playwright Rose Weill, an 11th-grader at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in northern Virginia, wrote the play for a community education class offered by Arena Stage.

Taking to heart her instructor's advice, she wrote about what she knew. The result is a satirical look at the college admissions process, fueled by humor. In it, the cast of Winnie-the-Pooh camps outside a college fair, waiting to meet with a representative of Harvard. Rabbit is on overdrive, and whips his friends into a frenzy. In the end, Pooh's slow indifference and impenetrable individuality win over the Harvard interviewer.

"I thought of the idea on the metro on the way [to the class]. I'd been trying to work on another play but realized it wasn't going to work," explains Weill. "I know Arena receives tons of great plays, and maybe part of the trick is to come up with something that could be performed with only a few people. I thought, ?Oh! This works with 5 or 6 people.' So I started writing."

The rehearsal is full of energy, with Tigger an actor in a black leather jacket and wrapped in a bright orange tiger-striped scarf, Owl a wide-eyed actor in big glasses, and Rabbit wearing two floppy ears and a running suit. The room erupts in laughter at several of the lines. Rose laughs, too, as her lines come to life through the actors.

"I was kind of scared going in to the first rehearsal," says Weill, "but everyone was so nice and all the actors were friendly, and the rehearsals were so much fun. It's different from the way you picture it in your head."

Raising the Curtain on Talent
The day of the performance, Rachel Grossman showed the playwrights around Arena Stage theater, and took them backstage to see where the work is done. That night, Rose Weill sat in the back of the theater with her mother.

Most of her friends couldn't make the show; it was AP test week. But the audience's reaction was enough to keep her spirits high. "It's weird, you're sitting there and people around you are laughing. It's a neat feeling," she says. "You feel kind of apart from it too, because once it's up there it's no longer your own, it's got its own life."

Despite having attended every rehearsal, Patrice Cooper is surprised by the strength of what she has written when she finally sees it performed on stage. "When the father actually hits the mother, she realizes how her daughters feel and she leaves. That was probably my favorite part and the breakthrough of the play," she says. "I didn't write it like ?Yay! She finally came to her senses,' but when I saw it performed, I was like, ?I wrote this.' It came out even better than I thought when writing it."

"All the way through, it was cool," she says, of watching her work performed before an audience. "People from school were there, and everybody was clapping and they gave a standing ovation, and it made you feel even better."

Emily Hawe says the project was a great learning experience—she's off to study dramatic writing at New York University in the fall. "After working on this play for so long ... to let it out of my hands onto a stage where hundreds of people will watch it is both frightening and incredible. The entire time I was thinking just how lucky I was to have had the experience of having my play produced in a professional theater."

In addition to introducing writers to the process, the DC Student Playwrights Project introduces the community to emerging young talent. "The project is at the cusp of new play development," says Grossman. "These are the new and emerging artists ... Rose Weill, Patrice Cooper and Emily Hawe are going to be your Paula Vogels in 20 years."

"The Student Playwrights Project brings the community, students and the theater together and strengthens the experience for everyone," says Grossman. "We get to reach out and say to the community, ?Hey, come on in.'"

Caitlin Johnson is a staff writer at Connect for Kids.