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After several years of serving on a mentors’ panel at Horizon Theatre Company’s New South Young Playwrights Festival and realizing how much talent there was in the room, it seemed like a great idea to honor one of them with a Dramatists Guild membership and some early tutoring about their potential life as a working playwright. This Festival is unique in that Horizon brings together twenty-some successful high school and college applicants from around the country for a week’s intensive with local and national theatre professionals that ends with readings of work generated during that time. Our goal for this new award is to acknowledge early signs of commitment to the craft and to get a sense of what this fledgling generation is all about. We conducted a workshop for the students and attended the play readings as a means for selecting a winner and I am happy to report that our 2014 (inaugural) Dramatists Guild Young Playwright Award went to Ben French from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. At the end of May, Roland Tec and I will repeat the process to select the 2015 recipient.

Ben French grew up in Columbus, Georgia, “half-way down the Alabama border on the Chattahoochee River.” This area which he describes as “dichotomous” in terms of economic, racial, and ecological realities provides the “kinds of conflicts between grit and magic, truth and beauty that really inform my writing.” An example is his play tiny frightened animals (winner of the 2015 Bill Hallberg Award) which was produced in April by The Sprawl, a new company he co-founded with Katie Kay Chelena. The play is about a father and son coping with loss in a river shanty community in South Georgia and features a “tiger chorus.” The setting of the play was beautifully literalized by performing it outside and by the “new community” that was purposefully created when the actors came together to make their own costumes and props. French has also become part of the Modern Shakespeare Society in Chapel Hill, a Neofuturist group that writes, compiles, and performs 30 plays in 60 minutes. In the past two years he has won the Sam Selden Award for Playwriting; served as the dramaturg for a production of Mark Perry’s The Will of Bernard Boynton at Kenan Theatre Company; and interned as a stage manager at The Playwrights’ Center.

With a new B.A. in Dramatic Art-Playwriting and Creative Writing (minor), French has decided to take some time before entering grad school “to really figure out the questions I want to bring with me.” A “late-bloomer when it came to really interacting with theatre on an active, personal level,” he describes a church service and running as part of his psyche as a theatre artist. The first was a gateway to his calling, though [this] “first theatrical experience I remember relating to wasn’t a play, but part of a church service.” He describes the effect of dramatic lighting on a text reader followed by a candle-lit processional – it was the experience rather than the doctrine that has informed his interest, including the “cultural importance of ritual”. As for his writing process, French, who is also a runner, compares it to preparing for a race. “There’s something painful about starting from scratch on Day One of a new project…just like it hurts like hell to get back into training after a long time off…but…My life feels more balanced and fulfilling when I’m training/writing.” As for the theatre of the future, French posits “A theatre whose audiences are as diverse & queer as the communities they serve.” Amen.

Another “Amen” is for Vynnie Meli who was approached by a producer last year to take on the difficult task of writing a musical around existing music. She almost said no until she heard it. The exciting result is ACAPPELLA, an uplifting romantic comedy that blends the “high-energy enthusiasm of contemporary a cappella with soul stirring gospel.” It heads to the 2015 New York Musical Theater Festival in June where, says Meli, “Director Lee Summers and music director Evan Feist reinvent percussion in musical theater.” Meli’s last NYMF show was Plagued, A Love Story.

pturner@dramatistsguild.com

playwright Ben French

tiny frightened animals, courtesy Ben French