Playwrighting is a messy business
Petty, who attends Philadelphia Virtual Academy, learned that dreaming up a play is easy. The hard part is making it coherent.
“The idea is always the easiest part because you can just put in a whole bunch of random things,” she said. “But then it’s trying to turn it into an actual story and make it make sense for anyone else to see it.”
For “When Tides Collide,” the 13 teenagers regularly split into small groups for 15-minute writing sessions to work on scenes. The groups sometimes devolved into excited chatter about anything and everything except the play.
“We just feed off of each other’s energy,” Petty said. “We’re like, ‘OK, I think I want to be doing something else right now.’ So, we just make jokes constantly until we end up wasting time. Then we realize we have to get stuff done.”
The Shadow Company works slowly, but with patience and small miracles the script gets written, the blocking gets set, the choreography is learned and the curtain rises.
“It’s so amazing, seeing a scene or an idea and being, like, ‘Wow, I put that in there,” Larson said.
“When we first started writing I had just read ‘Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler, and Gabriele was, like, ‘Here’s like the prompt for you.’ I was like, ‘Guys: post-apocalyptic world, new society?’ Seeing how what I said was important and my friends were, like, ‘We want to take that and run with it.’ That’s what makes it different from just doing a school musical or a theater camp.”
In the short term, that collaboration produced a play. Over time, Herrman sees it producing better human beings.
“Its important to learn how to listen well to people, especially people from whom you may have a very different opinion,” Herrman said. “It’s also really great for kids to get that experience of: How do you build something as a collective? You have to be taking another idea and be willing to change your idea and see where that can take you.”
Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series that explores the impact of creativity on student learning and success. WHYY and this series are supported by the Marrazzo Family Foundation, a foundation focused on fostering creativity in Philadelphia youth, which is led by Ellie and Jeffrey Marrazzo. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.