Alexa Laiacona is a freshman theater major who loves reading plays and belting out show tunes. She hopes that with her story gives readers an inside look into the life of a playwright. For Alexa, playwrights are not just 1,000 year-old poets writing in modern English about two-star crossed lovers; their stories are much more interesting than that.
Three years ago, if you had asked me what I thought of when I heard the word “playwright,” I would have said what most people my age would say: William Shakespeare or some other dead, classic writer.
Today, however, I would give you a more thorough answer. I would list off my five favorite playwrights as well as my favorite plays, though yes, I would go on for hours talking about Shakespeare.
What changed my perspective on playwriting and Shakespeare was not just time, but practice. Instead of attending an average high school, I attended G-Star School of the Arts for Film, Animation and Performing Arts.
Fortunately, it just happened to be in Palm Beach, Fla. only blocks from where I lived. During my junior year, I decided to take a playwriting class. Though I was no avid playwright or even the strongest writer, I hoped it would improve my creative writing skills.
Little did I know, the class would give me perspective, drive and a teacher who would become my mentor.
Above all of those things, it also allowed me to write my first play: a 10-minute comedy based on the classic short story, “The Gift of the Magi.” The final exam in that class was to write a 10-minute play and present it to the class. I presented that play and aced my final.
That one class gave me a small taste to feed my newfound passion for writing. When it was over, I continued to write monologues and scenes and even tried my hand at longer plays. A whole new world had been opened up to me, and I was desperate to explore it and figure out what I could do to improve my craft even more. I was done with writing 15-page fan fiction pieces that never had an ending and moved on to writing something that not only meant something to me but could mean something to someone else one day.
At the end of each school year, my school’s theater department held a student-run showcase entitled “Theater 101” that featured plays, scenes and monologues written, directed and performed by students. Though I previously never participated, I agreed to be a director my senior year and, after some minor peer pressure, I caved and agreed to also write a 10-minute play.
I initially planned to fix the draft of a play that I had written a few weeks before, but when I returned to my laptop and reopened the document, what I found was a choppy, unedited version of a play. It was about a girl desperately infatuated with a boy, tortured by visions of him and his girlfriend taunting her, with beings of her subconscious that had somehow taken over her mind. The draft ended with an artistic statement far too serious for some eyes, and after giving a copy to my mentor — and taking a short trip to the guidance counselor to assure them that I wasn’t suicidal — I began the re-write that my play desperately needed if it ever wanted to make it onto the stage.
Seven edits later, I was on the right path. The subconscious beings”simply became the good and the bad thoughts of the main character. The boy and his girlfriend were their own characters, existing in the main character’s real world while she lived out good and bad scenarios inside her head. This idea was deemed far more successful. One of my best friends directed it, a few good friends starred in it, and before I knew it, the night after graduation, my work had come to life.
I sat there, in the very back of our tiny black box theater, watching the story come to life. For a while, I almost couldn’t believe that something I had written ended up being featured on a stage. But each connection between the characters and moments they shared struck something in me. It was the idea that this was the beginning of something really special: the idea that, if I could bring this one significant story of my life — the character’s life — to the stage, who knew what else I was capable of?
Hey, they say write what you know, right?
