YOUNGSTERS’ WINNING PLAYS TAKE A BOW AT GASLAMP

“I was really nervous,” 14-year-old Hadley Worcester said Wednesday night. No kidding, Hadley; but then, so were a lot of other people.

Hadley had just sweated out the opening of her first play, “Water Under the Bridge.” It is one of four winners in the California Young Playwrights Project being performed through Sunday at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre. The production on the tiny Gaslamp stage marks the culmination of the project’s first year as a heady stimulant to young writers.

How many places actually give full, professionally staged productions of scripts by kids? Not many, so you can bet plenty of people were holding their breath on this one. Nobody knew how the plays and performances would go. That included her three co-winners; project director Deborah Salzer; stage director David Hay, and Kit Goldman, managing producer of the Gaslamp, which co-sponsors the project with the San Diego Unified School District. But the commitment to staging the scripts was made in February at the project’s beginning.

A blue-ribbon panel culled the four plays from 13 finalists. Panel members were Robert Blacker, associate director and dramaturge at the La Jolla Playhouse; Robert Berlinger, head of the Old Globe Theatre’s Play Discovery Program; Peter Brosius, director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Improvisational Theatre Project; Margaret McKerrow and Michael Harvey of the San Diego State University drama department, and Arthur Wagner of the UC San Diego drama department. Fifty-four entries were submitted by people 18 and under within five months of the program’s announcement.

The view from here is that, after 11 months, the project is an unqualified success. The plays being produced are not just entertaining; they provoke further examination of the subjects raised. The carrot of a production has served its purpose, luring teen-agers from high school English classes who already have mastered the art of written communication. Granted, the plays are not without flaws. No one is calling these writers seasoned playwrights, but they are facile communicators. Although they may bleed bullets during the lonely process of writing, these youngsters have a flair for writing. Perhaps most importantly, each has his or her own style.

Of the four playwrights, Hadley, who said she prefers to write short stories, has the most obvious command of dialogue. An often very funny one-act piece about a girls’ slumber party, “Water” skews to its surprising denouement. In real life such intimate gatherings as this slumber party rarely have the sharp, witty banter that we remember them having. Hadley gives her characters a snappy repartee that feels honest--obscenities and all--in the mouths of these contemporary California teen-agers. She stumbles, though, when she moves the play to a surreal level that comes off less subtly than the rest of the play. Give her credit for taking the gamble. One can only encourage her not to give up writing for the stage or perhaps television--there is little truly funny stuff on the tube--even while she writes her short stories.

“Captain Beefheart and the Legendary A&M; Sessions” is the title of Thomas A. Mournian’s play. The name, he has written, was chosen because it conjures a feeling of “gypsy energy” he associates with the late 1960s. Mournian, now 19, is a Mission Bay High graduate and a sophomore at UC Berkeley. “Beefheart” is about the grown white daughter of a white civil rights worker who seeks out the black Southern woman her late father once married. What’s important in life--money versus relationships--is one of the issues explored in the middle act--which is the one performed--of the three-act play. This segment has an intriguingly obscure air and a throw-away stinger at the end. Presumably this would be clarified when seen with the other two acts. In his own style, Mournian’s writing for two women calls to mind the elemental concerns plumbed in the relationships of Eugene O’Neill’s characters.