The Play Contest Is the Thing for Young Writer : Stage: Fullerton College student takes prize with first effort and sees it produced at San Diego’s Old Globe.

Tom Hyatt, a 19-year-old student at Fullerton College, vividly remembers the day a thin envelope from the California Young Playwrights Competition arrived at his house.

Then a senior at La Serna High School in Whittier, he had entered his first play in the contest without much hope of winning. And when the envelope arrived, he was sure he had lost.

“I figured it was a short letter telling me thanks for trying,” he recalls. “So I stared at it for an hour. It was terrible; I was crying. Finally, I ripped it open. I was shocked!”

From more than 150 entries, Hyatt’s play had been selected as one of four winners statewide from contestants 18 and younger. He saw the play produced last month at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where it was well received by audiences and critics.

Anne Marie Walsh, writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune, called Hyatt “wise beyond his years.” The play--a “pop-art version of surrealism,” according to Walsh--focuses on surviving childhood.

The 29-year-old protagonist tries, with the help of a psychiatrist and his boyhood Little League team, to reconcile the death of his father. He “blames himself for his father’s death because he hated him so much,” Hyatt says.

Despite its serious center, Hyatt says the play is a comedy. “What I try to do is give the audience the funnest way possible to solve problems.”

Hyatt says he had no formal training as a playwright, just a few high school English classes and four years of acting in student and community theater.

“I want to write what I don’t know so I can learn something,” he says. “I wrote about family members I don’t have. My dad’s not like the dad in the play. My dad’s wonderful.”

He added that his father, a lighting technician in the movie industry, and his mother, who owns a small business, had not encouraged him to pursue a career in the theater. “They were afraid I’d never be able to support myself. Theater was not on anyone’s Top 10 list. A business degree was more on the top of the list.”

Now, though, “they’re very supportive.”

Hyatt describes himself as shy but says he “really liked being on stage, being accepted. I really wanted all the attention.” He and a classmate decided to enter the contest last spring, when they heard about it from friends.

“She wrote her play in two weeks. Mine took me a month and a half, working every day. It got to be an obsession.” (The friend, who did not win the contest, currently attends New York University).

Hyatt says his greatest influences have been playwrights Wendy Wasserstein and David Mamet. “I just love to read,” he says. “I read, read and read, and I guess it soaks in.” In the next few years, he hopes to save enough money to transfer to UC Berkeley or UCLA where he would continue acting and writing.

“I don’t think that winning this contest makes me a writer,” he said. “It seems I did something right. Now I have to figure out what I did and how to do it again.”