New Play Development with CCNY Educational Theatre Graduate Students by Louise Schwarz

Over the summer, I held a virtual cold reading and discussion of a new one-act play that I wrote called Waiting for Glory. The play is about a team tasked with casting a new show and forced to hold open calls – with ridiculous results. The participants were mostly CCNY Educational Theatre graduate students, but I did invite a few other friends of mine who are actors and teachers or teaching artists, both locally and nationally. The mission was to think through the play for an educational theatre market; I’ve been writing plays for decades, but I have not typically written plays primarily for that context. I work in college admissions for The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the high school I graduated from didn’t have a theatre program at all so I’ve only recently been directly exposed to high school thespian festivals (main lesson learned so far from my festival visits: I’m jealous!)

(All photographs courtesy of Camp Ballibay)

In advance of the reading, I posed several questions to think about within the educational theatre framework, and then posed them again when we started in the post-readthrough discussion. What age group can you see doing this? As the hypothetical director/teacher, is it easier for you if the French scenes are divided into actual scenes to make scheduling and planning simpler, or is it better to build in a fast flow of transitions right into the text without delineating everything, in order to prevent multiple clunky scene transitions? Are there any red flags, is there anything problematic, is there anything that would get pushback from administration or parents? I was trying to tailor the play so that it would be easy to use on the festival circuit, and I know there’s a whole canon of popular plays with large, flexible casts and simple sets that run about 35-40 minutes, and it’s a very specific genre. Knowing that’s a thing, however, does not mean I’m very familiar with it! As a result, I was eager to hear from teachers who are pretty steeped in that catalog (or from teachers-to-be who remember it well as students), partly to hear if it fits that mold, but also to hear if anything in my play is already overdone or, conversely, if anything in my play might feel like a fresh take in that world.

It was a great group because we had such a wide range – a longtime suburban Arizona high school teacher whose students have placed and won in multiple thespian festivals all the way to professional actors who work as teaching artists in the NYC public school system. They were speaking very different languages, so it was exciting to hear their thoughts! It was also great to hear some of them suggesting building in more opportunities for directors to do big, grandiose things while others were begging me to simplify. It really drove home how dissimilar these worlds can be, and how much depends on resources and buy-in and leverage. Unsurprisingly, the more tenured drama teachers were definitely the ones pushing for the most simplicity! I heard that loud and clear, and it seems like the best approach is to make it as simple as possible with room for anyone with bigger ideas (or budgets) to go loftier, rather than making it complicated and forcing drama educators to do the work of paring it down. There were also polarized responses to the appropriateness of a few small bits of content, and we discussed ways that I could write in alternatives for teachers working in more conservative spaces. This also really drove home for me how critical it is for drama educators to be in community with each other, especially since so many are in very isolated roles at their schools.

The cherry on top of starting the summer bringing the CCNY folks into the development process of Waiting for Glory was that the summer ended with a production of it! Fellow CCNY Educational Theatre graduate student Alex Bernui heads up the Theatre Department at Camp Ballibay for the Arts in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and they made it happen!

I got a real treat when they shared the performance video with me – the play has 21 characters but these kids managed to pull it off with just 7 actors! They did such a wonderful job. Having its first production at an arts camp was particularly meaningful to me, since arts camp was where I cut my own teeth on drama as a kid (not to mention spending ten summers as an adult running the theatre department of a New Jersey arts camp).

In its current stage, I’ve revised Waiting for Glory down to two versions: a shorter, festival-length version (35-40 minutes) and an expanded version (50 minutes). Many of the actor-characters in the play audition with classical monologues, building in opportunities to work on verse and heightened language and to teach about plays by Goethe, Shakespeare, Marlowe, as well as Everyman by Anonymous. Both versions are also currently in the hands of a few publishers and several dozen drama educators worldwide (although I’m still tinkering with ways to tighten it up even more, just as I am with every play I’ve ever written), so I hope to see it out in the wild someday soon! I’m so grateful to my fellow CCNY Educational Theatre graduate students for helping out with their generous (and hilarious) talents and feedback, and to the graduate program in general for helping me think in a new way about who I’m writing for.