VOICES: High School Playwright Winners Offer Slice of Life : Young Voices Provide a Slice of Life

M: No, you want gross? The thought of your mother having sex with your dad.

F: Eww!

M: You know they do.

F: I know they did twice. Me. And my sister.

M: Come on! I bet they go at it constantly!

F: My parents won’t drive with the windows down on the freeway. They lived through and yet completely missed out on the entire rock and roll movement. They were born middle-aged and are now swiftly progressing into elderly oblivion.

M: They have to do something for fun.

F: They watch “Sixty Minutes.”

“We’re Talking Today Here,” Draft 3. Annie Weisman, 19, Torrey Pines High School graduate and one of the four winners of Plays By Young Writers ’92

For eight years, the San Diego-based Playwrights Project has given young California writers under 19 a chance to compete in an annual one-act writing contest.

It also gives an annual glimpse into what the next generation is thinking about. Every year, the shows, which are usually produced in a professional venue, touch on everything from child abuse to rape to life on the track team to the frustrations of growing up a child of undocumented workers.

This year, Annie Weisman, now 19, a graduate of Torrey Pines High School, gives her insights into the struggles of a high school senior coming to terms with her own confusing feelings about life, school, ideals and sex in “We’re Talking Today Here,” a two-person play with characters identified simply as Male and Female.

Her work, along with that of three fellow winners from San Clemente, Santa Monica and Sacramento, will be produced in two programs, performed in repertory at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage tonight through Dec. 20. Veteran San Diego performer Marc Wong, a UC San Diego undergraduate and onetime member of the Young Globe acting company, and Karen Hartman, a two-time Playwrights Project winner and Yale graduate now working as a teaching artist for the Playwrights Project, will perform.

It’s Weisman’s first play. And while it was inspired by her own high school experiences, the catalyst to write it came from Playwrights Project and her ongoing exposure to San Diego theater.

“I pretty much have grown up being in and around theater, being in plays and seeing a lot of theater,” Weisman said on the phone from her dormitory at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. where she is concluding the first half of her freshman year.

Not only did she attend shows at the Old Globe Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse with her parents, who are season subscribers to both, but she performed in one of the Old Globe’s Play Discovery offerings at the Cassius Carter (where her own play will now be presented). Right before she attended a Playwrights Project workshop at San Diego State University three years ago, she saw the La Jolla Playhouse’s production of “Ajax,” which she describes as “startling and wonderful.”

Deborah Salzer, founder and director of the Playwrights Project, remembers being so impressed with the talent of the shy, skinny young blonde in the class that over the next three years, she wondered when Weisman was going to send her a completed script for the contest.

Finally, this spring, Salzer got a phone call from Weisman, asking if she was too late to submit a play--there was time, barely, so Weisman sent it in and after a few readings she was told her play was one of the winners. Not long after, Weisman went to Williams College. She has participated in the rehearsal process long distance--through phone conversations, videotaped rehearsals and faxed revisions with Mark Hofflund, Literary Associate for the Old Globe Theatre, who is directing her work.

Weisman said that while she loves writing, she was afraid, from the beginning, to write a play. She pushed herself to complete this because she was approaching 19 at the time, and after her birthday, she would be too old to compete in the contest.

“It was easier to write scenes in the class, because it was a low commitment. You would write a scene or a monologue and you would present it. But a play is such a whole that I was terrified to have it be seen and judged--it was so public. I had never done anything that was so public before. I was scared to commit myself to a play.”

“I’m still terrified.”

Intriguingly, the generically named “female” in Weisman’s play is also a frightened person--although she masks it well under intellectual prowess.

“760 Verbal, baby,” the girl says, quoting her SAT scores as she dares the boy to argue with her at one point in the play. “That’s all I have to say to you. 760 verbal.’

Weisman said she finally wrote her play because “I felt like I had something to say. I didn’t want to write just for the sake of writing.”

In the process of working with her director, she has also been forced to confront why she wrote what she wrote. There has been much “haggling” and “compromise” she said.

“Mark (Hofflund) has been good about saying, ‘Why did you make this choice?’ and I have had to defend it or say, ‘Yes,’ and change it. I’ve pretty much thought about every pause now. I have even called him about page 20 to say, no I don’t want this period there, I want a comma.”

She has also stood up against challenges. One scene that she fought for and succeeded in preserving was the one she calls “the gross-out scene” in which the two characters begin by comparing the grossest things they can think of and end by trying to picture the girl’s parents in bed together.

For Weisman, that scene went to the heart of what she was trying to say about growing up without common heroes or ideals or even illusions.

“It was really important to me because I wanted it to be about how today, my generation--if you can call it that--we don’t have any heroes. We grew up with Watergate and believing that of course all politicians are pigs. I wanted the scene to be about how reality ends up being the gross-out and the gross-out ends up being their reality.”

At the same time, the challenge has, for her, been the “best” aspect of the whole experience. As for seeing her own play produced at the Old Globe, it’s important enough for her to take two days out in the middle of papers and finals to fly out to see it, but it’s also, well, “scary.”

“I keep calling my Mom and tell her not to tell anybody. It has my name attached, and it’s not an allegory about three frogs in a cranberry patch. It’s obviously about my experience and that’s pretty terrifying.

“But the best aspects have been being forced to explain myself and what I want to say and how I want to say it. What’s great about the Playwrights Project is that when they say they nurture playwrights, that’s true. They don’t cushion the blows or patronize. They give you what you need, which is positively motivated criticism.

“There’s no way I would have been able to do this without their help and pressure. They take it seriously, so I have to take it seriously myself.”

* Performances of “We’re Talking Today Here” and “Free For All” are 8 p.m. today, Friday, Dec. 17 and 19 and 10:30 a.m. Thursday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Performance of “The Dreamwalkers” and “The Unwall” are 8 p.m. Thursday, Saturday, Dec.16 and 18 and 10:30 a.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Dec. 20. Tickets are $7-$9. At the Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Balboa Park, 239-2255.