HIGH SCHOOL PLAYWRIGHTS COME TO GRIPS WITH SUCCESS

Meredith Stiehm got The News on the phone from her mother.

When Stiehm’s mother opened the envelope from the California Young Playwrights Project, “I made her reread it again and again,” recalled Stiehm, a 1986 graduate of Santa Monica High who was recruited to play varsity tennis at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was the most exciting thing ever.”

The News also came by phone to Matthew Purl and Martin Kevorkian, who are freshmen at Claremont-McKenna College and Stanford, respectively.

“I just shouted very loud,” Kevorkian said. “I’m not a demonstrative person. People looked out of their rooms and came to me and said, ‘Martin, are you all right?’ ”

“I screamed down the hall,” Purl said. “I think I said: ‘Hey, I just made it in show biz. I’ve got a play produced.’ ”

Purl, Stiehm and Kevorkian acknowledge that they haven’t actually “made it,” but they and two other high school playwrights have achieved something few students and fewer adults have done: They have written scripts that are being turned into full-scale, professional productions.

In the second annual California Young Playwrights Project contest, four scripts (Purl and Kevorkian collaborated on one) were selected by a panel of theater professionals from among 80 submitted.

Sponsored by the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre and the San Diego Unified School District, the project offers young playwrights the opportunity to see their ideas come alive on stage at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre.

This year’s performances run at the Gaslamp, 547 4th Ave., through Sunday.

Founded two years ago, the project is an outgrowth of New York City’s highly successful Young Playwrights Festival and is designed to encourage young writers (18 and under) and to develop audiences for the theater.

When she was home for the holidays, Stiehm drove down to San Diego to participate in rehearsals. “We’re all being so calm, “ she said, watching her co-winners talking nonchalantly. “I can’t help think that we all are excited on the inside.” Purl and Kevorkian based their play, “Artistic Perspective,” on their experience as student docents at San Diego’s Timken Art Gallery. The main character is Chip. As he attempts to explain to visitors the painting he has studied, Chip is buffeted by the sharply varied opinions of the visitors.

Although staged in a broadly comedic style, the play has a serious premise at its root. “There’s something about art,” Kevorkian said. “You can’t reduce it just to study, just to words.”

Another winning playwright, Todd Peters, is an intense, 18-year-old high school senior at the O’Farrell School for the Performing Arts, whose idea of a good time is “to be asked to do something that I can’t do.”

Peters knew from the start that his entry would be a winner.

Why?

“Because people my age don’t have much on their minds,” the serious redhead said. Peters’ play, “Auto,” about a young man growing into manhood by discovering his parents’ needs, takes place in a car. But the name also refers to the Greek meaning of auto: self.

Peters has since had second thoughts about his play. “It’s about myself and my family,” he said. “I’m nervous, I’m wondering if I want to put myself and

my family in front of others. I didn’t realize that others would see it.”

Peters, who relates everything in his life to acting, found a new respect for the text during rehearsals of “Auto.” “As an actor, I learned that actors tend to be very selfish. They think a great deal about themselves. They want to get up and show everybody how good they can act,” he said.

“I (now) have much more appreciation of what it means to sit down and try to put your heart and soul and guts down on a piece of paper, and what a responsibility it is to an actor to live up to that.”

Playwright Karen Hartman, a 16-year-old junior at La Jolla High School, chose the relationship between mothers and daughters as the basis for her play, “In My Mother’s House.”

This summer, Hartman directed a production of the play for a public access cable television station. “I was very heavy-handed,” she said. “I totally underestimated my actors.”

Watching the director work with the cast at the Gaslamp, Hartman, who acted in last year’s Playwrights Project, came away with a different perspective on the relationship between the text and the actor: “I would say, ‘It must be done that way.’ If you do that, it’s going to be flat, because it’s not coming from them.”

Stiehm, who also directed her play once before, felt the same way. “I became something of a tyrant,” she said. “I wasn’t giving the actors any space to interpret for themselves.”

Called “Stealing the Raven,” Stiehm’s play is “my guess at what a tragedy is. It isn’t based on a previous experience. I think it should be.”

Instead, Stiehm relied on her confidence to write dialogue and the advice of a high school teacher that she should rewrite it and reshape the play.

The short play is about two girls in school, one of whom despairs of writing an original poem, and wants to “steal” Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem about a raven. The girl’s friend, who has a fatal disease, admonishes her not to steal another person’s ideas, but to use her own. “It’s about the essence of life and loving life,” Stiehm said.

Bright and articulate, Stiehm says she and a group of her friends plan to join forces when they graduate from college.

“I’ll write, and a friend will produce, and the rest of us will act,” she said. Movies, perhaps Oscar-winning feature films, hover in her imagination as she looks to the future four years down the road.

But for the time being, she says, “the best award of all is knowing they’re producing my play.”