DCist Interview: Patrick Torres, Young Playwrights' Theater
Too often, D.C.’s public schools, and by extension, its students, are dismissed as failing, disorganized, and hopeless. But Patrick Torres doesn’t see them that way. Instead, he sees stories waiting to be told, students waiting to be empowered, and language as a tool for social change.
Torres is program manager of The Young Playwrights' Theater, D.C.’s only professional theater company dedicated solely to arts education. YPT uses playwriting to advance student literacy, creative expression, and conflict resolution through interactive in-school and after-school programs. The organization connects students, teachers, families, actors, playwrights, and professional theaters in order to create new plays that reflect the voices of their communities, with a particular focus on the diversity of voices that make up the American experience. YPT also stages student work throughout the Washington area in professional productions and tours, serving as a forum for communication between youth and the wider community. In many cases, YPT provides students with their first exposure to theater, and in its twelve years of existence, has fostered the creation of hundreds of new plays and has reached thousands of D.C. students.
YPT’s New Play Festival, a staging of new work created by the students in YPT’s In-School Playwriting Program, including students at Bell Multicultural High School, Wilson High School, MacFarland Middle School and Fillmore Arts Center, will be held tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. Admission is free.
Torres took some time off from rehearsals this week to answer a few of DCist’s questions about the organization.
YPT states that part of its mission is developing a new generation of playwrights whose views are traditionally underrepresented in the theater and the community. Can you expand a little bit on what that means? What kinds of perspectives and voices do you encounter in the students' plays that are new or under-represented?
American theater has been growing, especially in the last 20 years, towards greater diversity in its playwrights and all its artists. But there are still too few female playwrights being produced, too few playwrights of color and way too few playwrights from around the globe. At YPT we’re lucky enough to work with the next generation now, from places as varied as Ethiopia, China, Cameroon, El Salvador, Mexico and Sweden. We’re committed to developing the voices of these students and to promoting their points of view for inclusion in the greater professional field. We need them. If theatre is to continue to be relevant, it needs to reflect and express the extraordinary diversity that now exists in our community – and it needs to reflect and speak to the younger generation. Otherwise it will lose its audience and its reason for being, very soon.
One example of a fresh perspective is by a young woman from Beijing currently being produced in our New Play Festival. Her play explores the difficulty of being an Asian ESL student in a culture that seems to more easily embrace students who are ESL and Spanish-speaking. In her play we gain a peek into how isolated and cut out of our community (and out of the local or national dialogue) our fellow Americans from Asian descent may feel. It’s an extraordinary and extraordinarily brave play that has taught us a lot about a human experience we had never heard on stage before.
How was YPT started? What kind of challenges did the organization face in its early years? What challenges does it continue to face?
After completing her MFA in Playwriting at Brown, Karen Zacarias, YPT’s Founder, returned to D.C. with a strong desire to use her art to positively impact her community – and to build a company of social conscience. She began by going into Bell HS and teaching playwriting for free in 1995. Within a year or two she was teaching in dozens of schools and hiring other playwrights, actors, directors and designers to help her bring her unique approach to playwriting into the classroom. By 1997 YPT was incorporated as a 501c3, with a board of directors, fulltime staff and dozens of funders supporting the work. The main challenge facing YPT in the early years, as with all organizations, was to gaining enough funding to survive while forming a full staff and enough infrastructure to move forward. Today the challenges are similar – how do we serve thousands of students each year, with only a fulltime staff of four, and while relying almost entirely on contributed income? We can use all the support we can get. But now, another nice challenge is that demand for our programs is so high we need to grow in order to serve all the students and teachers who want to work with us—and who could benefit from YPT. We need to expand.
How does YPT build its school partnerships? What does the in-school playwriting program consist of? What is the end result?
We build partnerships primarily through relationships with teachers who have expressed an interest in our programming. The basis of our In-School Playwriting Program is a series of workshops designed to teach students a holistic, interactive writing process. In addition to the workshops, which focus on dramatic writing tools (character voice, structure, monologue, dialogue, etc.), we bring professional actors into the classroom to read the students’ work. The first visit focuses on revision and allows us to demonstrate the importance of expressing yourself clearly as a playwright because the participants watch how an actor interprets what s/he has written. YPT also takes students to see a performance at a professional theater. For many, this is their first exposure to theater and the dramatic form. The end result of the program varies for different grade levels. Elementary school students collaborate on a group play, middle school students produce individual monologues exploring different character voices, and high school students complete a short play on the subject of their choice.
How do you view YPT's role in D.C. public schools, and in the larger D.C. community? How can theater be used to reinforce the academic skills students need, both at the elementary or secondary levels?
By exploring playwriting, revision and performance with professional theater artists in the classroom, students learn the importance of language structure, grammar, spelling and vocabulary choice as a means of clearly communicating their own thoughts, choices and imaginations to the world around them. Rather than learn English Language Arts as a set of disconnected rules, students in the In-School Playwriting Program discover how they can express themselves and engage the world around them through the art of playwriting. These student voices create a living history of those that call D.C. home.
Theater is an excellent way to reinforce academic skills because it requires critical and creative thinking. In today’s internet-driven, outsourced, global economy, the race for success in America will be won by those who can imagine – those who can create – those who can think for themselves – and in many ways YPT is preparing students to do all those things, to think outside the box so they don’t need to fit within someone else’s paradigm.
Another important skill theater teaches is conflict resolution. Conflict is essential to drama, and analyzing conflict and characters’ responses to those conflicts teaches us about how to handle a variety of situations. Some of the most rewarding moments in my experience with YPT have been sitting down with a student who has chosen a violent ending to his/her play and challenging them to think of other ways their conflict could be resolved, and watching the student begin to think through and articulate the many options the character has other than resorting to violence. It opens many students to new ways of seeing their world.
Are there any particular themes of subjects that you see reoccurring in student work? How do you see those playing into our city's cultural or political climate?
The major themes that reoccur in our secondary students’ work are teen pregnancy, gang violence and immigration. We ask students to write about what is on their minds…about conflicts that are personal, so it is not surprising that these themes reoccur. Our job is to encourage the students to look at these problems with a fresh perspective and make a statement that will teach the audience about their experiences. I believe it plays into our city’s cultural climate because it represents the view of the city’s citizens. D.C. is so often thought of and regarded as a federal city, and the stories YPT has collected represent the history of the city and remind us that the city has pressures and problems that can be ignored. I believe our plays have urged people to be more supportive of after school programming and invest more in the welfare of youth in D.C.
The New Writers Now Series that YPT started hosting last year seems to be attracting different kinds of audiences to student writing. I'm thinking in particular of the memorial reading that was done after the death of Edwin Ventura, which was packed with representatives from every aspect of the community. What have been some of the reactions you've witnessed from the community to the students' plays?
I find that people are consistently surprised by the conflicts our students face. Our audiences also consistently admire the depth of thought our playwrights demonstrate. Inevitably, the audience admits they have found a deep connection in the work and many times have been compelled to action. We have had audience members pledge monetary support to the work of YPT, donate books to local schools and request meetings with playwrights all because a student put pen to paper and expressed him/herself. The power of the pen is clearly evident at all of our events.
The night of Edwin’s memorial the community came together in such a palpable way. Sitting in the room with community leaders, students and Edwin’s family while his peers and professional actors brought his words to life was a crystal clear example of why YPT exists. That night we celebrated the life of one of our students by honoring his words…words that we will always have with us to cherish. People left that tribute with a new care for students and the community.
What's next for YPT? What are the long-term goals the organization building towards?
We’re actually engaging in new strategic planning process this Spring, as demand for YPT programs is at an all-time high and we need to prioritize what we want to pursue. That said, some of our dreams include: having our own resident space (even shared with another company) where we can continually produce and build larger audiences while providing an artistic home for thousands of D.C. students throughout the year; expanding the In-School Program to all eight wards of D.C. and replicating our successful model of integrating into an entire grade level at each school; sharing our model for arts integration and program assessment nationally, in order to integrate the YPT program into schools throughout the U.S.; partnering with companies from throughout the U.S. and around the globe to create new work and share the work of D.C. students with the rest of the world, with festivals and tours; publishing our students’ work, so their writing can be read and performed by young people everywhere; helping to fully re-integrate the arts into D.C. Public Schools, so the nation’s capital can again have one of the best school systems in the country.
This year, YPT has implemented two classes in Spanish this year to reach more students than ever before, specifically those students whose primary language is still Spanish Our programs have had success with students who are struggling with learning English because we implement so many active exercises. We have just started a new after school program called the Young Playwrights Workshop. The majority of our students in the workshop speak English as a second language. I think it speaks volumes about the way we engage non-native speakers that so many have chosen to join us for this process. In some ways it’s a great model for what the rest of the world needs to do—just get into a room together and figure out how to help each other move forward. What else could you need?
Images courtesy Young Playwrights' Theater