Three Young Playwrights With Promise

Since the age of 11, Adam Stein has been hoofing his heart out in other people’s plays at the San Diego Junior Theatre, La Jolla High School and Yale University.

Now, at 18, the Yale sophomore is looking forward to seeing other actors work in his play.

Stein is one of five California playwrights under age 19 chosen by the Playwrights Project to have his play produced. “The Shakespeare Club” opens Wednesday at the Bowery’s Kingston Playhouse.

The fact that three of the five winners are from San Diego seems both a tribute to the variety of theater they have to choose from here and the infiltration of theater programs--such as the 6-year-old San Diego-based Playwrights Project--into the school systems.

Stein, for example, grew up on a diet of Shakespeare from the Old Globe Theatre, which got him “real interested in Shakespeare . . . especially ‘Hamlet’ this summer. I thought it was absolutely brilliant.”

Stein’s play takes five Shakespearean characters--Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and Richard III--who ponder their lives in a contemporary setting patterned after the movie “The Breakfast Club.”

He spent three summers in the summer conservatory at the La Jolla Playhouse, seeing all the shows there. And, during his vacations here, he also catches whatever he can at the San Diego Repertory Theatre and Starlight Musical Theatre.

Still, Stein said, he might never have gotten the idea to write his first play if not for the Playwrights Project and his fellow La Jolla High School graduate, Karen Hartman, who was a winner in the 1987 competition.

Stein won a part in Hartman’s play, “And One Bell Shattered,” which was produced at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company.

“It was such a great experience,” Stein said. “I thought then it would be so exciting to have a play of your own produced. I’d written before, but not plays--mainly short stories. But I knew that, when I wrote a play, if I was under 19 I would submit it to the Playwrights Project. I’d been thinking about that for a long time.”

For the other San Diego winners--Rachel Balko, 17, and Robert Sayles, 16, both students at Poway High School--the Playwrights Project played a much more direct role in transforming would-be writers into produced ones.

Deborah Salzer, founder and executive director of the project, got things rolling by teaching playwrighting to a group of teachers at Poway High in the winter of 1988.

One of the teachers there, Becky Tilles, was so excited about the workshop that she attended an adult playwright workshop at San Diego State University, organized by Salzer and taught by director Scott Rubsam.

Tilles used the lessons learned there to start a playwrighting club at Poway, which Sayles and Balko still attend.

She and fellow teacher Michael Ball, who now teaches at Rancho Bernardo High School, also applied for a School Improvement Program grant that has funded Poway High’s own annual festival of one-acts. That is where the winning plays of Balko and Sayles were first produced.

Tilles now teaches ninth grade in West Linn, Ore., just outside Portland, but she remembers the excitement of that start-up time well.

“If there’s anything you can say that Poway High did correctly, it was that there was a whole core of English teachers who were directly involved in playwrighting. There was a committee who supported students having a right to say something about their lives. And both plays (by Sayles and Balko) say things that are tough for some conservative audiences.”

Sayles, who attends theater at the Old Globe, the Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre and the Moonlight Amphitheatre, got the idea for his play, “When Reality Refuses to Cooperate,” from an exercise Tilles conducted in the drama club.

Sayles recalls that Tilles asked the 15 students in attendance to write down a secret, which she would read aloud, without revealing the author. He was stunned when about half a dozen of those secrets turned out to be that the students had been molested as young children.

“I got interested in the subject and got involved in a peer counseling program,” Sayles said. “And then I got enough common experiences to put together a story about a young boy coming to terms with being molested as a child. It’s also going to be produced in March at Anaheim at a statewide peer-counseling conference.”

Meanwhile, the very title of Balko’s play, “Exhausted, Depressed and Sexually Frustrated,” was considered so controversial at school that Balko had to leave it untitled for the Poway production.

Salzer talked her into changing the title to “Also Known As . . . “ for the Playwrights Project production, but only because, as Salzer told her, the original title was boring.

The subject, however, certainly isn’t.

“It’s basically about a woman who tried to kill herself and was committed to an institution because she wouldn’t tell anyone why she tried to kill herself,” Balko said.

Now, as a result of the encouragement of having won the contest, Balko, who grew up seeing plays at the Old Globe and dress rehearsals at the San Diego Opera, is seriously considering a career as a writer, as is Yale’s Stein. Sayles wants to continue writing too, but his main goal now is to become a high school English teacher, with a minor in psychology.

That, in part, is because Sayles, who is “ecstatic” over the victory, gives so much credit to his instructors.

“There are some amazing teachers in my school. If not for them, I would have no idea about how to write a play.”