[NEohioPAL] Local playwright makes good

[Bob Abelman]

A playwright in progress

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times, Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This article, one in a series of profiles of local theater personalities,

appeared in the Times papers 4/22/10

 

 

Some know early in life that a career in the performing arts is their true calling, their only calling.

 

They can't stop dancing.

 

They sing at the mere mention of a Broadway show or a line from a Broadway show or anything that sounds like a line from a Broadway show.

 

They scribble ideas for plays on napkins, on their hands and in the margins of notebooks intended for math equations and science formulas.

 

Many struggle for years before getting their break.  Most just struggle.

 

Molly Hagan knew early on that she was a writer. She just had no clue that she was really a playwright.  Not while growing up in Auburn and attending Kenston High School.  Not upon entering the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.  Not even when she first enrolled in a freshman playwriting course and wrote a rough draft of a one-act play called a brief theory of the cosmos.

 

Now a graduating senior, she is watching this play being performed in the 500-seat Kennedy Center Terrace Theater in Washington, DC.  Molly is a finalist in the 10-minute play competition at the 42nd annual Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) and, at last, has a clue about her calling.  

 

"There is a richness in her writing," noted Gregg Henry, artistic director of the KCACTF and artistic associate for the Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences.  "Molly is a complex storyteller who writes beautifully and wraps it all up in a very interesting package."  

 

The KCACTF is a national theater program involving more than 18,000 students from over 600 colleges and universities nationwide.

 

>From the hundreds of one-act plays submitted and evaluated on the regional level, six from each region were chosen to be workshopped and showcased.  From those plays, two from each region were selected for review by the national playwriting committee.  Of those 16 plays, only five were invited for a staged reading at the Kennedy Center.

 

Only one playwright will win the competition, get published, receive a cash award and be given a professional staging opportunity.

 

Molly found out about the competition in October, was informed that she made the regional cut in December, had her play workshopped in January, and learned of her invitation to the  KCACTF just last month.

 

This past Friday night, Molly watched as the first play she had ever written was read aloud.  By professional actors.  At the Kennedy Center.   Before an audience.  She watched with the other young playwrights and their families, and waited for the winner of the competition to be announced.  

 

"Watching my play being performed was surreal," recalls Molly, "and, truthfully, by the time the awards were handed out, I wasn't concerned with the outcome.   It was an amazing week-completely satisfying and exhausting-and nothing could change the experiences I had at the Kennedy Center."    

 

a brief theory of the cosmos did not win the competition.

 

This matters little to Molly, for her life has just taken a wonderful and unexpected trajectory.  She is a playwright.

 

The Kennedy Center's website states that one-act plays are the "haikus of the theatre"-emotional shorthand that, if done well, are perfect gestures of theatricality and language that evoke the same power and pleasure as any full-blown piece of dramatic storytelling.   

 

Here's a haiku worth considering:

 

Molly the playwright

A long time in the making

The cosmos unfurl 

 
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