THEATER REVIEW
'Plays by Young Writers' downsized but still daring
By Jennifer de Poyen
ARTS CRITIC
November 26, 2003
Some say that playwrights are born, not made. Others, like Edward Albee, a born playwright if there ever was one, think otherwise, lending time and effort to the development of young writers.
Albee's an artistic adviser to the Playwrights Project, the San Diego-based arts education organization founded in 1985 by Deborah Salzer to help young writers give voice to the characters and ideas and emotions that burn inside them. Every year, the Playwrights Project sponsors the annual "Plays by Young Writers" competition, open to all Californians under 19, and produces the winning scripts in a multi-week festival.
This year, Salzer's budget has been slashed in half – the Legislature's decimation of the California Arts Council didn't help – and the project has been accordingly scaled back. The festival, long ensconced at the Old Globe, also had to find a new home when officials there decided to produce holiday shows on all three stages.
In the face of such challenges, and in a bid to keep standards high, Salzer and her staff decided to produce fewer scripts. Just two plays are getting full productions at the Lyceum Theatre, downtown, through Dec. 6 – 19-year-old Brandon Alter's "Forty Miles From Tel Aviv" and 16-year-old Tyler Moselle's "How They See It."
As it happens, both Alter and Moselle are from San Diego, as are the four younger winners (Ryan Aanerud, 13; Mikaela Aziz, 13; Tanner Dufford, 11; and Taylor Renteria, 10) whose scripts are being read on a rotating schedule throughout the festival.
Intriguingly, both Alter, a freshman at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and Moselle, a junior at University City High School, were moved to write about questions of safety and fear. They have taken very different tacks, however. Alter set his sights on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been turning over in his mind for years. Moselle stayed closer to home, penning an account of a stranger kidnapping as seen through the eyes of the victim's young friends.
On balance, Moselle's is the more successful play, for she's writing what she knows. Her characters – second-graders Tara (Briona Daugherty) and Kyle (Jack Novak) and fourth-grader Megan (Becca Foresman) – are middle-class school kids. And, movingly, the adults in their lives (parents and a school principal) are largely absent, and their attempts to help the kids deal with Abby's disappearance are, well, unhelpful.
Director Linda Libby visualizes this beautifully, placing adult actors (Walter Ritter and D. Candis Paule) behind a backlit dropcloth, so they only appear in shadow. In one particularly eerie scene, Kyle's soon-to-divorce parents are grotesquely deformed figures who rage at each other and leave their son to grow up on his own.
Alter's play is a daring gambit – an attempt to humanize Palestinian suffering and extremism with an intimate look at the last day in the life of Malik (Diep Huynh) and Salah (Anahid Shahrik), an Arab couple living in the West Bank. Alter's dialogue doesn't always feel organic. But his empathy places him in the great tradition of the Western theater, from the Greeks on down.
Both plays haunt us with the knowledge that our young people are deeply marked by the drumbeat of traumatizing news that daily flows through the media and into our homes. But it is heartening to note that there are young artists among us who are moved to reflect upon, and give voice to, our hopes and fears in this post-9/11, terror-filled world.
