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.
