Last fall a medieval drama opened to rave reviews at the Kennedy Center. Peasant Revolt recounts in rich, Arthurian vernacular the story of Sir Cameron of Byrd, a gallant nobleman who risks his life to join a peasant uprising and defeat a tyrannical king. As Kennedy Center regulars might expect, the cast, crew and director were stage veterans. But the playwright, Cameron Byrd, was a reticent 13-year-old from inner-city Washington, D.C., who had never written a play before.
Byrd’s play was one of five written by middle school and high school students and produced by professionals this year through the Young Playwrights Theater, the brainchild of Karen Zacarías, ’91. Since earning her master’s from Boston University’s playwriting program—under the tutelage of Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Elie Wiesel—Zacarías has won acclaim for her own plays. But she also directs YPT, a nonprofit that teaches conflict resolution through playwriting in D.C. schools. Grants and private donations fund the project.
The students’ plays tackle subjects like sex, drugs and suicide but are genuinely entertaining—rarely preachy. “Audience members often say they’re surprised children wrote them,” says Zacarías. Though not every script is produced, each gets a professional reading—an astounding 500 since the program began in 1995.
Fostering creativity makes sense, but conflict resolution seems a hefty undertaking for a writing class. Not true, says Zacarías. Since the early Greeks, the stage has been the perfect forum to expose society’s failings and to flesh out individuals’ problems. “Kids get stuck; they can’t figure out what to do with their lives. In dramas, everything is very concentrated. You push characters to a point where a decision has to be made or something cracks. People make choices on stage that they may not make in real life.”
When she started the project, Zacarías—fresh out of grad school —carted teaching materials around the city to 18 classrooms every week. The idea was to introduce theater to kids who wouldn’t ordinarily see it. Willing teachers let her take over one class session a week for 16 weeks and integrate playwriting into the curriculum. By the end of the course, each student had seen two productions and written a play that was given a reading by professional actors. Schools and community centers around town performed a few of the plays. Zacarías also put together an after-school curriculum for 9- to 12-year-olds.
Seven years and some 50 productions later, the organization shares space with other nonprofits in a very lived-in building in the capital’s Adams Morgan district. Zacarías runs the operation, directs plays, and these days shares classroom duties with six other teachers. There are five office staff, and the program employs as many as 30 actors and directors a year.
PROLIFIC: Every student’s play gets a professional reading.
Nick Olcott, who has worked with the likes of Ed Asner and Julie Harris, has become a regular YPT director. “Quite frankly, every year I approach this job with dread. I have no time for it. I have no budget. But from the first time I meet with Karen she’s so brimming with enthusiasm, she’s infectious,” he says.
Olcott was initially skeptical about the program. “I thought it was well-intentioned but would only be a moderate success. I’ve been involved in collaborations between community theaters and professional theaters.” Think Waiting for Guffman. “But because the kids are so fresh and their ideas are so fresh, the professionals get excited,” Olcott says. “The kids get to see professionals at work, and the end result is very rich.”
According to Zacarías, the best playwrights are not necessarily the best students. They just have stories—and inner struggles—that are dying to come out. “We’re not about finding the next Tennessee Williams,” she says. “It’s about each kid finding his or her voice.”
Zacarías noticed, for example, that some girls were having trouble writing themselves as protagonists. “We had a lot of plays about girls getting pregnant and waiting for their boyfriends to call.” So the teachers tried to help them model more proactive characters. One result is The Wonka Wonka Cool Girls’ Club by 11-year-old Cecilia Jenkins—a comedy that explores the cruelty of popular girls. Another is a highly charged family drama about a gay teenager whose parents can’t accept his lifestyle.
For the young playwrights, seeing their writing produced can be a transforming experience. “Because live people are doing their work, the kids suddenly realize their words are important enough to be heard and performed on stage,” Zacarías says. And that realization can have a dramatic effect, as Olcott attests. “We had one kid who was an oddball and a recluse. He wrote a really popular play, and his school gave him a standing ovation. Last I heard, he was running for student government.”
For Fayshawn Caston, seeing her first play, Just One O’ Them Days, produced by the avant-garde Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company was revealing. “It was sort of surreal, and it was more lively than I imagined. The places I didn’t mean for it to be funny, it was funny. Where it was supposed to be funny, it was funnier,” she says. Not yet 16, Caston now has four plays under her belt, including one performed for a fund-raiser at the National Cathedral. She says Zacarías is her professional role model.
An independent study by a private educational firm in Baltimore confirms the program’s benefits: participants improved their grades, read more and watched less TV than their peers. “I don’t think school explores the imagination as much as it used to,” says Zacarías. “You can impart facts, but most kids will be fighting boredom. Imagination is what happens when you add creativity to knowledge. Theater fulfills a basic need—it lets you envision your life being different.”
ROOTS: Zacarías often sets plays in Mexico.
Theater unexpectedly changed Zacarías’s own life during her senior year at Stanford. An international relations major and freshman dorm RA, she decided on a whim to dramatize a short story she’d done for a writing class and submit it to Winter One-Acts. Blue Buick in My Driveway was a hit and the start of a prolific career.
Since Stanford, Zacarías has seen 17 of her plays produced, including shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. She has written a number of children’s plays set to music by Debbie Wicks-La Puma, ’91, including the frequently staged Magical Birthday Piñata. In 1998, Zacarías took home the D.C. Mayor’s Award for outstanding emerging artist. Her biggest success has been The Sins of Sor Juana, for which she received the Charles McArthur award for outstanding new play at the Kennedy Center’s Helen Hayes Awards last year. Already, two production companies have approached Zacarías about a film option.
It could be argued that creatively Zacarías follows her father’s side of the family. Her grandfather is Miguel Zacarías, a popular director from the golden age of Mexican cinema who gave megastar Maria Felix her first role. Zacarías says she wrote Sor Juana essentially on a dare from him. The play is a feminist retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century poet who—mysteriously in midlife—joined a convent and swore in blood that she’d never write again.
Zacarias’s Mexican grandmother—“who was brilliant and difficult and never realized her true talent,” the playwright says—inspired her latest creation, Mariela in the Desert. Set in Mexico in the 1950s, the drama portrays the last days of a marriage between two bohemian intellectuals who run an artists’ colony. It will be read at South Coast Repertory and the Kennedy Center this fall.
Zacarías has five more plays in the works, but she’ll have to juggle them. At her five-year reunion in 1996, she reconnected with classmate Rett Snotherly, who lived downstairs from her at Rinconada freshman year. Later, they married, and in March, Zacarías gave birth to Nicolai Snotherly, most likely the protagonist of many adventures to come.
Gabrielle Banks, ’91, MA ’92, is a writer in San Francisco.
