Youths Find Inspiration to Write Plays

A bright, ambitious and determined young woman who dreams of attending college leaves high school and goes to work because she fears that filling out the necessary forms for academic financial aid might reveal she is an illegal alien.

That is not one of the winning plays in the California Young Playwrights project, sponsored and being given full productions by the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre and playing through Jan. 24. But it is the story behind one of the five winning playwrights, 18-year-old Josefina M. Lopez, who graduated in 1987 from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

In Lopez’s play, as in the one-act dramas by the other playwrights selected last May from a field of 169 works submitted by Californians under 19, the threads of her real story can be seen gleaming in and out of the richly imagined tapestry of her work, “Simply Maria, or the American Dream.”

But one should not confuse the life and work of these young artists by asking Lopez if she is a mother of several children like her Maria character, or speculate whether her best friend, fellow winner and co-graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, 18-year-old Pamela Mariva Mshana, has ever been pregnant like the character Ebony in Mshana’s play by that title.

“I can’t believe that when I was in New York, a young girl asked me what I did with the baby,” said Mshana, now a freshman at New York University.

Unlike Ebony, who seems to fall unwittingly into repeating the mistakes of the mother she thought she would never, in any way, resemble, Mshana said she is complimented when her brother says she is just like her mother. She speaks glowingly of the time her mother told her children, “We can do anything we want to do . . . I remember those words when I feel low.”

Still, Mshana, whose play also won a staged reading at Playwrights Horizons in New York in October, added, “I think to a certain point it (writing) has to be autobiographical because how can you speak about something you don’t know about? I don’t mean that I am Ebony, but I do know of relationships like that. It may not have been my mother, but maybe it was my auntie . . . “

I do know of relationships like that.

The young playwrights’ insights sometimes have a way of landing tellingly and unsettlingly right on target.

Karen Hartman, 17, from La Jolla High School, a second-time winner in the 3-year-old statewide contest, emphasizes that she has never, like the sensitive heroine in her play, “And One Bell Shattered,” come close to having a nervous breakdown because of an absorption with Sylvia Plath, a poet the soft-spoken, vulnerable-looking Hartman admires.

But one can hear her personal concerns, warning about the cost of being called “special,” echoed not only in the murmuring assent in a joint discussion with the other winners but also in the play itself, providing the best and truest moments in Hartman’s work.

“I want people to walk away from the theater a little bit disturbed about the idea of being the exception,” said Hartman, bending forward with earnest urgency. “That the longing to be special and stand out can conflict with the desire to have peer support. To recognize that labels like ‘brilliant’ and ‘exceptional’ can go either way and have negative effects.”

Of course, what gives Hartman’s often melodramatic plot the spin that makes it special is her portrayal of the concomitant fear of not being exceptional, of not measuring up to true genius--resulting in a self-doubt that makes all the praise and hope more intensely painful.

Pain, of another sort, nourished the simple but elegantly written “The Porcelain Tutor,” by 17-year-old Rita Jeffries. In Jeffries’ case, however, it was not a hurt that inspired the story, but the story that led her to rediscover an old hurt.

When asked by one of her teachers at Grossmont High School to “write about what you know,” Jeffries was hard-pressed to find anything exceptional in a life that she felt up to then had been “pretty happy.”

Then she thought about her father, who had divorced her mother when Jeffries was in fourth grade, only to remarry her two years later. “And then I realized there was a lot of resentment in me. I wrote this play and I thought, my God, this is painful. It was a lot more painful than I’d like to think it was.”

Yet, like the others, Jeffries used her personal experience as the basis of her play. She portrays two friends, one reaching out to an estranged father and one pulling away when approached.

“I wrote Jane and Tara as two sides of me, two extremes,” said Jeffries who, on her opening night, showed up with her father, resting her head warmly on his arm. “You want to see your father, you want him to still love you, but you want to be closed because the more open you are, the more vulnerable you are.”

As with Jeffries, the playwrighting contest inspired then 10-year-old Kari Lyderson to begin her first play. When her story of “Punks vs. Nerds” was rejected for not being real enough, she tried again with “Swim, Sandy, Swim!” a story about a girl pressured by her mother to become a swimming champion.

It was a story that Lyderson, now 12 years old and herself a top swimmer, knows well even if it is more of a result of what she has observed than lived at meets.

Lyderson’s play is in the special under-14 category and received a reading rather than a full production. She has already started on a new play for next year’s contest. But what happens to some of the others who, as they approach the hoary age of 19, will be put forever beyond the pale of 18-and-under contests?

Jeffries wants to be a psychologist and Lyderson a marine biologist. Hartman, who will be attending Brown University in the fall, plans to continue as a “student of life.” Mshana wants to be a playwright.

As for Lopez, her success in the California Young Playwrights project, which followed close on the heels of placing in the Playwrights Horizon contest which her friend Mshana won, was recently awarded a 6-month internship in a Hispanic Playwrights Workshop with Maria Irene Fornes beginning Jan. 18 in New York.

The accolades that Lopez has won lend her the confidence to apply for the money she needs to attend New York University and study theater with Mshana in the fall. But first Lopez must get her green card, which she expects to receive this month thanks to the new amnesty laws.

“I have been in fear all my life,” said Lopez, referring to the constant threat of deportion that she and her seven siblings lived with. Now, as she looks ahead to becoming the first one in her family to go to college, she said the greatest satisfaction is that her two younger siblings “have hope.”