Young Playwrights’ Theater Brings Dramatic Arts Workshop to Festival
By Karen O’Keefe
Imagination permeates the mind of a child like snowflakes fill the sky in a winter storm. But how to get them to express themselves?
One way is to teach them to write plays, according to the folks at Young Playwrights’ Theater (YPT), an award winning, nationally recognized D.C.-based leader in arts education.
Today, YPT serves more than 7,000 students and community members every year, with free in-school and after-school theater arts workshops and professional performances of student-written plays. In addition, YPT has won grants to bring their workshops to school a school in Texas and to link a class at Ballou Senior High School in D.C. to playwrights in a classroom at Western International High School in Detroit.
On May 17, YPT will empower students at the Gaithersburg Book Festival to discover in their own stories, the value of their voices — and the power of their ideas.
“We teach our students that what they say matters — and that people want to hear what they think,” says YPT Program Director Laurie Ascoli.
She added that since plays turn on conflict, writing plays helps students learn to resolve conflict both on the page and in their lives.
Ascoli will lead a playwriting workshop at the Gaithersburg Book Festival designed to engage students in writing that is creative, personal and concerns things they care about.
Since 1995, when the nonprofit YPT began with a single volunteer playwright teaching workshops in D.C. classrooms, the organization has grown to include six full-time staff members, eight professional teaching artists, and dozens of professional actors, directors and designers supporting YPT’s work both on-stage and in the classroom.
In 2010, YPT was honored with a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. First Lady Michelle Obama bestowed the award which is the highest honor arts education programs can receive in the United States.
Speaking at the White House ceremony, NAHYP recipient Mariana Sanchez said she enrolled in YPT’s DC After-School Playwriting Program to learn English. The experience became far more than language lessons, she said, as she witnessed the power of her words when the audience cried and laughed during the performance of her play. “Now here I am addressing the first lady of the United States,” she said.
Who knows where playwriting may lead?