This June, Otterbein University student playwrights had the opportunity to see their scripts come to life through the Dublin Community Recreation Center’s Abbey Theater of Dublin in its summer production, the Otterbein Playwrights Collective.
Otterbein students in assistant professor Jeremy Llorence’s playwriting and scriptwriting class submitted a one-act piece for their final project and the Abbey Theater selected three to produce and bring to the stage.
Llorence says that too often, students never pick up their final projects again after they are submitted. Through this initiative, he hopes students will feel inspired to see their pieces through to production.
“The main goal for me … was to have students really experience (a script being produced),” says Llorence. “In order for a (script) to become what you want it to be, it has to be produced either on stage or screen.”
The three selected playwrights, Niah, Lucy Clark and Whitney Burton, all took different approaches to the class and the final project.
Niah went into the class with an experimental mindset. She wrote her play, The Boy in Neon, by incorporating Gothic and supernatural elements into a contemporary story. Niah says she submitted her piece with zero expectations.
“I was cautiously optimistic. … I thought, ‘It probably won’t be a big deal,’” she says. “And then I was wrong. I was glad to be wrong.”
Clark, primarily a true crime prose writer, felt out of her comfort zone in Llorence’s class. She pushed herself to write a contemporary realism screenplay, something completely new to her.
“(The story’s content) was something that I was familiar with personally, but not in terms of writing,” says Clark.
As primarily a prose fiction and poetry writer, Burton had never written a script before. However, following the success of their script for the Otterbein Playwrights Collective, Burton says they hope to write more plays in the future.
“When I write, it usually is somewhere in the comedy realm,” they say. “I tried to keep that while adding some more drama than I usually would, as I felt it might balance the tone with the story I wanted to tell.”
Llorence formatted his class by breaking it up into two halves. The first half of the semester, he focused on teaching the form of playwriting and screenwriting. The students worked on short scenes and scripts.
During the second half of the semester, Llorence encouraged the students to pull their new skills together to focus on the final project. Students could revise and combine previous works into one story or create something new entirely. Each of the three writers says they were blown away by the new skills they learned in Llorence’s class. Niah mastered avoiding “pizza talk,” or conversations without purpose, such as what type of pizza to order. She says she learned that every word should count and move the plot forward. Clark felt like she had to condense a lot of her thoughts from prose to screenplays, and that she learned how to make sure every detail was important.
“It’s a lot of thought and detail put into it,” says Clark. “More than I’ve had to contemplate with prose.”
With Llorence’s guidance, Burton focused on creating a backstory for each of their characters to give them more depth.
“Llorence did an amazing job introducing me to a lot of new ways to think about writing,” they say.
The writers were amazed to see their work brought to life by Abbey Theater actors.
Clark says she experienced different feelings seeing her work on stage as compared to the feeling she gets when completing a prose piece.
“I got goosebumps a few times,” she says. “I was like, ‘I wrote these things and (the actors) are saying them and being the characters.’”
After the success of this year’s Otterbein Playwrights Collective, Llorence is eager to repeat the project again next year.
“I’m really excited that, for the first time through, we had such strong writers, such strong actors and some great directors,” he says. “(Repeating the program) is 100 percent the goal.
Sarah Grace Smith is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@ cityscenemediagroup.com.
