The Ensemble Theatre Company (ETC) is accepting applications for its 4th Annual Young Playwrights’ Festival. All aspiring writers, ages 13-19, are eligible to apply.
The four month-long program provides young writers “a safe and nurturing environment in which to learn the craft of playwriting.” The process involves the participants developing a 10-minute play that will ultimately be produced and staged with professional directors and actors for public audiences.
The program will accept up to 20 students from Santa Barbara County, and there is no cost to participate.
“Students in the Young Playwright Festival program will receive multiple and varied opportunities to develop their creativity and gain artistic skills,” says the Ensemble. “Phase one includes weekly classroom instruction focusing on the study of playwriting techniques, a brief history of American theater and a lively forum for discussion and critique of student work.
“At the completion of this first phase, students will have completed a draft of a 10-minute play. Phase Two provides one-on-one mentoring from a professional playwright to help students engage in the revision process.
Phase Three gives students the opportunity to participate in a live casting session with professional actors, develop a creative collaboration with an experienced theater director and actors to produce a live staged reading in front of an audience, as well as participate in an on-stage talk-back session with audience members.”
ETC education director, Brian McDonald, said, “Responsibility to the story is the thing, and the development of storytellers for the future of the American Theater may be one of the most valuable youth educational programs that Ensemble Theatre Company can offer the Santa Barbara community.”
This couldn’t come at a better time. While the aged remain at the greatest risk of dying in the pandemic, it is school-aged youngsters, K-12, whose social and intellectual development has been seriously, sometimes permanently, disrupted by the school closures and the isolation which follows.
For those chosen to participate, the ETC program brings the students to focus on words, and the use of language to create verbal structures that illuminate and dramatize human interactions, human conflicts (rather than allowing them to drift, masked and anonymous, through the hall of distorted mirrors that in the Internet).
Thus, in a broader sense, they will learn not only how plays work, but also how life with other people works, too.
In support of this last point, I offer the following stunning passage from Madame de Staël‘s 1810 book “On Germany.” Arguing for the teaching of languages, rather than mathematics or natural science, as the basis of a young person’s education, Madame de Staël observes:
“We have imagined that it was necessary, as long as we could, to save children from toil, to change all their studies into amusements, to give them, at an early age, natural history collections for games, physics experiments for spectacle. It seems to me that this is also an erroneous system.
“If it were possible that a child might learn something by amusing himself, I would still regret, on his behalf, the [lack of] development of one faculty, the attention, which is many times more essential than most knowledge.
“I know that one might say to me that mathematics especially repay application; but they do not train to reassemble, to appreciate, to concentrate: the attention they require is, to speak thusly, in a straight line: the human mind operates in mathematics like a spring which always follows the same direction.
“Education by entertainment disperses thought; toil in every form is one of the great secrets of nature: the mind of the child ought to become accustomed to the efforts of study, as our souls to suffering. The perfection of youth depends on work, as the perfection of maturity depends on sorrow: it is doubtless desired that parents and fate do not abuse this double secret too much; but in all ages of life only that which acts upon the very center of existence is important, and too often we consider the moral being piece by piece.
“You may teach your child a quantity of things with pictures, with cards; but you will not teach him to learn, and the habit of amusing himself, which you direct towards the sciences, will soon follow another course when the child is no longer dependent upon you. [Italics GC]
“… The study of grammar demands the same discipline and the same strength of attention as mathematics, but it derives much more closely from thought. Grammar binds ideas to one another like the calculus binds numbers; grammatical logic is, moreover, as precise as that of algebra, and yet it is applied to everything in our minds which is living.
“Words are at the same time figures and images; they are slaves and freemen, submissive to the discipline of the syntax, and all-powerful by their natural sense. Thus one finds, in the metaphysic of grammar, exactitude of reasoning and independence of thought joined together. Everything has passed through words, and everything is found there when one knows how to examine them.
“The languages are as inexhaustible for the child as for the man, and each can draw from them everything he needs.” [Chapter 18]
(Quite apart from demolishing any suggestion that television is a suitable medium for the education of the young, De Staël establishes — I think decisively — the centrality of language in any effective system of education.)
The Young Playwrights’ Festival will begin online, with the hopes of having an in-person presentation on the stage of The New Vic, ETC’s state-of-the-art venue, in late May.
Jan. 31, is the deadline to apply for the program. Applications may be found online at https://etcsb.org/education/young-playwrights-festival.
This year’s festival received a $19,000 grant award from California Arts Council, which supports projects for youth from infancy through age 24 that operate outside of school time, in artistic venues and community settings as well as on school sites.
The program encourages relevant, dynamic, and innovative community building and learning through youth-focused arts and culture projects. (This should not, however, discourage you from making your own contributions, once you get to the ETC website.)
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.