Los Altos Teen Playwrights Taste the Big Stage [VIDEO]

Maggie Kristian was astonished. The words she was hearing were familiar. After all, she wrote them.

Indeed, the Los Altos High School senior had slaved for a month over word choice, character, and structure in the play-writing segment of her acting class. But Thursday afternoon she heard those words come alive when spoken by real actors, and it was a revelation.

"It just becomes this amazing, huge entity that really touches you to your core," the 17-year-old said. 

Now it was just 90 minutes before friends and family were due at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts for the culmination of the Young Playwrights Project: The presentation of eight students whose ten-minute plays had been chosen from among 35 classmates. 

It is a program TheatreWorks of Silicon Valley, intended to cultivate the next generation of American playwrights. It pairs playwrights-in-residence with advanced Bay Area theater students who are interested in dramatic writing. 

"These are teeagers who are writing very sophisticated stuff, very challenging stuff," said Jake Arky, associate director of education for TheatreWorks and artist in residence. They also had students who wrote humorous plays, capturing the language and perspective of their contemporaries with authenticity, he said.

One student wrote of a politician with a drug problem, that included instances of of racial tension. Maggie's play was about a couple considering divorce, and she was able to find the voice of people 20 or 30 years older, Arky said. 

"She just nailed it," added theater teacher Nancy Moran, who has worked with these students in the Acting I class at Los Altos High School. 

Among the humorous plays was one by Miaulian Chang about two friends who are entrusted with the pet hamster of a popular boy at school, and it goes into hibernation, and they fret about having killed it. 

What was all the more remarkable is that this particular class is actually a beginning acting class, said Moran. During the fall semester she taught the basics of acting, so that by January, when Arky took over the play-writing segment, they had a foundation.

Students who had been interested primarily in acting quickly discovered an appetite for play-writing under the tutelage of Arky, who, at 27, is just a decade removed from their experiences. Of the 35, eight plays were chosen.

The young playwrights included Anthony Mata, Molly Palu, Elizabeth Vazquez, Drew Sanders, Maggie Kristian, Scott Delamare, Chelsea Nivision and Miaulian Chang. They span the grades from freshman to senior.

Students from Palo Alto High School, Gunn High School, and Willow Glen High School are also currently involved in the program.  

Next up at the performing arts center is Palo Alto High School on April 22 and Gunn High School on April 30.

Palo Alto and Gunn High School performances will be combined into one larger play per school, in a special project titled “The Emergency Manual for 2023.” The two highlight issues Palo Alto and Gunn students thought deserve more attention from the community, and was developed by TheatreWorks with the guidance of Student Services at Palo Alto Unified School District and Project Safety Net, according to a news release from TheatreWorks.