Vassar Student Playwrights Earn Top Honors for Debut Full-Length Works
Two Vassar students were awarded $1,000 prizes this spring for winning separate playwriting competitions overseen by the Drama Department. Avery Epstein ’28 won the inaugural Phillip Cook Aspiring Playwright Prize for Deer Farm, and Leila Stark ’26 won the 26th iteration of the Marilyn Swartz Seven ’69 Annual Playwriting Award for Oranges Peel Oranges.
Following a staged reading in the Martel Theater on April 11, Epstein said her idea for the play germinated after a brief stint working on a deer farm in Switzerland where the deer were fenced in and hunted for profit but were also free to roam a wide-open space. She used the setting to explore how modern technology, such as virtual reality, plays a part in contemporary life. The family running the farm is being recorded via virtual reality, which she likens to the freedom and captivity of the deer. “The family is given freedom to speak and act freely while being recorded, and simultaneously being used as a product curated for consumer consumption.”
Two characters named simply Boy and Girl, represent the voices of young people coping with technical innovation, she said, adding, “Deer Farm grapples with questions of moral responsibility, personal fulfillment, and the role of surveillance in social memory.”
Epstein, a philosophy major from Brooklyn, said Deer Farm was her first attempt at playwriting, so she was somewhat surprised she had won the Phillip Cook award. “I edited it a lot about a year ago and had a full draft by September,” she said. “I’ve applied to have it performed at several festivals later this year.”
Judges for both awards were playwright Liza Powel O’Brien ’92; Gabriella Kimbrough ’22, playwright-producer and the 2022 winner of the Swartz Seven Prize; and actor-producer Brandy Burre, best known for her role in the acclaimed TV drama The Wire and the 2014 documentary about her, Actress. In awarding the Phillip Cook prize to Epstein, O’Brien called Deer Farm “a formally ambitious, meticulously constructed play … The particulars are timely; its concerns are eternal, and the level of craft with which it is articulated is rarely seen so early in an artist’s journey.”
Like Epstein’s Deer Farm, Stark’s Oranges Peel Oranges was Stark’s first full-length play. She used an experience from very early childhood—peeling oranges with her grandfather on his porch in Orange County, CA—as a symbol of the bond between the two main characters in the play, a teenaged girl who is battling an eating disorder, and her grandfather, who is slowly succumbing to dementia.
Stark said watching a staged reading of the play at the Martel Theater on April 25 was “a really emotional” experience. “I wanted to write a play about memory and addiction,” she said. “My own grandfathers [she says she considers a great uncle a third grandfather] are getting older, and I’m glad they’re still with me.”
Kimbrough said she and the other judges were captivated by the play, calling it “a uniquely tender piece that uses lush, poetic language to tell a heartbreaking and relatable story … The piece flows beautifully, intertwining conversations across time to tell an emotional story of grief and loss at a transitional period in a young woman’s life.”
Stark, a drama major from Orange County, CA, said she had concentrated primarily on directing during her time at Vassar but thoroughly enjoyed the experience of writing a play. She credited three members of the faculty—Professor and Chair of Drama Shona Tucker, Assistant Professor of Drama Peter Gil-Sheridan, and Assistant Professor of Drama Amanda Culp—“for supporting me and making me realize this could be a career path.”
Any ideas for another play? Stark was asked.
“It’s percolating,” she said.
About the Phillip Cook Aspiring Playwright Prize
Endowed in 2024 by Vassar alum Demetra Takes ’72, the prize is named in honor of her late husband. It is awarded every spring to a sophomore, junior, or senior in any academic discipline who submits the best full-length play, a pair of one-act plays, or a musical theater work.
Takes, who attended the staged reading of Epstein’s play, said she had decided to endow the prize because she and Cook shared a lifelong passion for the theater. “I see the prize as a way of giving some playwrights here at Vassar a first step toward producing their work,” she said. “My husband was a real theater lover, so I decided to honor his memory in this way.”
About the Marilyn Swartz Seven ’69 Playwriting Award
The Marilyn Swartz Seven ’69 Playwriting Award was established by friends and classmates of the late Ms. Seven to support an annual playwriting competition open to all Vassar juniors and seniors. After Seven died of leukemia in 1997 at the age of 50, her classmates, with the help of Professor Emeritus of Drama James Steerman, honored her memory by establishing a fund to support this yearly award.
Dee Wilson ’69, a classmate of Seven’s, attended the staged reading of Oranges Peel Oranges. She said she and Seven had become more closely acquainted during their 25th reunion. Wilson said she had learned how immersed in drama her classmate had been, “so some of us who knew her decided to give back to the College in this way.”