Young writers ready plays for production at Stony Brook Southampton

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A casual, or even close, observer could be forgiven for thinking that the educational outreach being offered this spring at Stony Brook Southampton, the one that makes middle school students into playwrights, was lifted directly from Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, where a nearly identical program has been offered for a number of years now.

After all, the program is being coordinated by Emma Walton Hamilton, one of the founders of Bay Street, with her husband, Steve Hamilton, and the person responsible for establishing and developing the educational outreach at the theater. And Ms. Walton Hamilton’s partner in the Stony Brook Southampton effort is Will Chandler, who administered the Young Playwrights program at Bay Street under Ms. Walton Hamilton, and stayed on at the theater for another seven months after Bay Street announced that Ms. Walton Hamilton and Mr. Hamilton were moving on to pursue other projects last spring.

Middle school students, meanwhile, could be forgiven for not caring where the program originated. The students, after all—this year from Bridgehampton, Pierson in Sag Harbor, Eastport South Manor, Shelter Island and the Ross School—are the ones reaping the biggest rewards, learning about the requirements of writing for the stage, creating 10-minute plays for two characters, and taking part in the production of a select few of those plays on the stage of the Avram Theater at the campus this weekend.

In rehearsal this week, the plays picked from each of the classes involved in the program will be presented in a special matinee for students at 11 a.m. on Friday, April 24, before the figurative curtain goes up at 7 p.m. on Saturday night for the culminating performance of the inaugural program at the college.

Both Ms. Walton Hamilton and Mr. Chandler agreed in an interview this week at the college that picking which plays will be produced is the hardest part. Every student in all of the classes writes a play during the seven weeks and 14 sessions of the program, and “all are wonderful, all are worthy,” Ms. Walton Hamilton said.

The teaching artists who work with the students are tasked with making the selections based on a number of considerations, including balance of male and female roles and serious and comedic themes as well as originality and relevance of topic.

As has typically been the case in Ms. Walton Hamilton’s experience, this year’s plays, she said, “range from poignant, painful growing-pains plays to outrageous comedies.”

In the former category, Mr. Chandler described a play that will be staged this year involving two young men: one of the boys is on the verge of being in serious trouble, and the other is trying to pull him back from this dangerous edge. The play “looks at what real friendship means in an intense situation,” Mr. Chandler said.

Other topics of plays picked for production this year include: a zany and out of control Passover dinner seen from a kid’s perspective; time travel to ancient Greece to visit with a teenage Socrates; Alice in Wonderland finding herself in the wrong play and confronting seven dwarves; an astronaut who “is not the brightest bulb on the tree” imperiling a mission; and a teen celebrity and a student changing places, like Mark Twain’s prince and pauper.

As far as similarities and differences of the young people’s playwriting programs at Bay Street and Stony Brook Southampton are concerned, Ms. Walton Hamilton suggested that it might be helpful to consider the titles assigned by the two institutions. At Bay Street, it’s called the Young Playwrights Program, reflecting a central component of Bay Street’s mission: “an ongoing commitment, through educational programs, to the continued growth and sustenance of theater as a vital art form in America.”

At Stony Brook Southampton, the playwriting outreach is only the first program to be implemented in the Young American Writers Project, a title derived from its acronym, YAWP, a relatively obscure word referring to “a raucous noise” favored by the poet Walt Whitman. Just as playwriting is central to Bay Street’s identity, writing of all kinds is the core of the Master of Fine Arts degree program in writing at Stony Brook Southampton, whose director, Robert Reeves, came up with the idea for the Young American Writers Project. Next year, YAWP will be expanding to cover the disciplines of screenwriting, poetry, fiction and personal essay.

The premise of the program, Ms. Walton Hamilton said, is to send professional writers and those working in a given discipline into the schools in a workshop setting. In addition to seven-week courses, offerings will include three-day workshops and one-day workshops. “Schools will have a diverse menu to choose from,” she said.