Hour Five: In Pursuit of the First Draft

Playwrights Patty Loughrey and Marcia Cebulska are making the rounds, checking in with each of the student playwrights to see how their work is taking shape. For their part, the students tend to be pretty focused on their characters and the personalities they've given them, or on specific bits of dialogue that they've written. It's interesting to watch Patty and Marcia steer the conversation, ever so gently, toward questions of structure and narrative arc. "What are these characters going to learn or discover?" Patty asks one student.


Flanked by a box of Nilla wafers, Independence High School junior Aubrey Near is typing up a storm.


For Crystal Moon, a senior at Highland Park High School in Topeka, it's tricky to think like a playwright instead of a stage manager (a role that she's filled many times in the past). As she talks with Patty and Marcia about her play, Crystal keeps coming back to questions of how to stage a particular encounter between children playing in a forest. "Let the director worry about that," Marcia advises. "You don't have to direct, you get to go home and sleep." Patty agrees, quoting the advice of playwright José Rivera: "Always put one thing in your play that's impossible to stage and then leave it up to your actors to solve it."