Features

Our Names in Lights: The Marilyn Swartz Seven '69 Playwriting Award

By Alexis Greene '69

Marilyn Swartz Seven ’69 died in 1997. At Vassar, she was a psychology major, but her first love was always theater; during the summers she performed in stock productions or toured as a dancer with Ann Corio’s This Was Burlesque. After graduating, Seven continued to dance and act; but she also began to write plays, which soon took precedence in her creative life.

When Seven died of leukemia at the age of 50, her classmates honored her memory by establishing a playwriting award in her name. (They were assisted by the Office of Development and Professor James Steerman of the drama department.) This award is open to any Vassar junior or senior who submits a play of high dramatic quality to a committee of members of the drama and English departments.

First given in 1999, at which time the winner received a staged reading and $500, the award now offers a $1,000 purse. The winner of the 2006 award was actually five winners — a handful of enterprising undergraduates who fashioned a performance piece called Live Feed: Rigel Byrum-Ridge ’06, Lisa Cornfeld ’06, Erica Fox ’06, Tyler Penfield ’06, and David Rosenbaum ’06. “It was wonderful (and sometimes a bit stressful) to have five creative minds working out a problem,” noted Fox. “I found it incredibly rewarding to be able to create a piece from the bottom up and to perform in something I really believed in.”

Meanwhile the VQ was curious to know about past recipients of the Seven Award; so we asked them about their winning plays and where their careers have led them. The interviews were conducted both over the telephone and in person.

Jason Platt ’06

Winner 2005
Entering in Verdant Skin

Jason Platt '06
Jason Platt '06
VQ: WHEN DID YOU BEGIN TO WRITE?
JP: I started writing when I was 10. I was always thinking up incredible situations, and at some point I decided it was a waste not to write them down, to get them out of my head. My senior year in high school, I fell for an actress. She found out I was a writer and said, “Why don’t you write me a play?” So I did. The play was some silly little thing, but playwriting was something I felt I was good at, and I also enjoyed the way the play was formed—the craft of it.

VQ: HOW DOES A PLAY BEGIN FOR YOU?
JP: I get images in my head—static images—and explore them. With Entering in Verdant Skin, I had an image of a bedraggled man emerging from the woods. Where did he come from? I started exploring how we deal with things that make us uncomfortable. So the play became about how a family deals with a son who comes back from the dead, in a sense, and how each family member deals with the unknown or the tainted.

VQ: DO YOU REWRITE?
JP: I’m having the most trouble with that right now, with the play I’m writing for my senior project. As a beginning artist, you feel you’re destroying something you’ve created. I get through it, but I don’t enjoy it as much as the blank page and the writing. Entering in Verdant Skin is the first play I’ve made changes in.

VQ: WHAT ARE YOUR ASPIRATIONS?
JP: I see theater today as overly intellectual. It’s lost touch with the majority of people in the country. So I try to create theater that’s less about intellect and more about emotion. I try to create a visceral reaction, and then hopefully the audience will go home and mull it over.

Christopher Johnson ’05

Winner 2004
Ol’ Head Country Wisdom and the Ibeiji’s Tale

Christopher Johnson '05
Christopher Johnson '05
VQ:WHAT INSPIRED YOUR PLAY?
WCJ: The play grew out of some short stories I had written about a family in Alabama. The family uncovers the legend of an immortal conjur [a spirit figure] woman and, by uncovering that tale, learns the history of their county. When writing the stories, I wanted to position myself as part of a tradition in African-American literature and African-American history. Certain things spoke to me: lynching, the Civil Rights Movement, and, stylistically, the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

VQ: WHAT LED YOU TO TRANSFORM YOUR STORIES INTO A PLAY?
WCJ: I saw an ad for the Seven Award. I had never written a play before, and it was maybe a little longer than people expected—the reading was pushing three hours. But it was a great experiment for me. Even though the actors weren’t that familiar with the work, they illuminated things about the characters — contradictions I hadn’t been aware of.

VQ: WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING SINCE YOU GRADUATED?
WCJ: Based on the plot of the play, I completed the first draft of a novel, Keep My Headstone Clean. The play takes place in two time periods—the present and the 1960s. The reading told me that a lot of things needed to be consolidated, that I needed to tighten up the narrative. The novel takes place around the 1960s. I am now pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing at Indiana University, but one of my main drives is to complete my novel.

Megan Melanson Cooke ’03

Winner 2003
Over Here

Megan Melanson Cooke '03
Megan Melanson Cooke '03
VQ: WHAT IS OVER HERE ABOUT?
MMC: I took personal narratives written by women on the American home front during World War II, dramatized them, and shaped them into a play with music.

VQ: WHAT LED YOU TO THAT SUBJECT?
MMC: I had started to think about my senior project. September 11 was still fairly recent. It was an interesting moment in history; I felt that everyone was nervous, wondering “What’s coming next?” My fiance (now my husband) was on active duty in the Army. My grandmother was living with my family, and she had been the same age during World War II as I was on September 11. I talked with her about her experiences and also read Studs Terkel’s The Good War. But many of Terkel’s stories were from men who had been overseas; he’d only interviewed a handful of women. I thought, “There’s got to be more material out there.”

So I started doing research at the Vassar library, and I found some wonderful material. I’d never written anything before—I was a drama major, but my focus had always been directing. I knew I did not want to create a piece that was only monologues; I wanted to turn the women’s stories into scenes. So I kept as true to the women’s words as possible and invented situations. For instance, the opening scene takes place in various households that are hearing the radio broadcast about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The announcement comes on, and they start telling their experiences of hearing and reacting to the news.

VQ: HAVE YOU BEEN INVOLVED IN THEATER SINCE YOU GRADUATED?
MMC: While my husband was stationed at Fort Irwin, California, I staged musicals there. Right after World War II, the government started theater programs at Army posts for Morale, Welfare, and Recreation activities, and, fortunately, Fort Irwin still has a program. I directed Little Shop of Horrors, and I staged Annie with all the kids on the base. Over Here is scheduled to be done as a reading in New York.

VQ: WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE $500?
MMC: I still have it. I put it away. I said, “I’m going to use this either to work on a new play or take this one to the next step.”

Sharyn Rothstein ’03

Winner 2002
The Three O’Clock

Sharon Rothstein '03
Sharon Rothstein '03
VQ: TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PLAY. SR: The Three O’Clock is a series of vignettes set in a train station, with various strangers meeting and interacting. Two actors play all the parts. Recently I wrote a play called Relation Trip to accompany it, about four people taking a train to a wedding, including a girl in her mid-20s and her boyfriend. By the end of the trip, they realize they have different understandings of marriage and they’ve broken up. In The Three O’Clock, the characters are all strangers, so I wanted to write a piece in which we know the characters’ relationships.

My generation has so many people whose parents are divorced— divorce was such a constant throughout our childhoods—that how we enter relationships and what we think marriage is become extremely important.

VQ: HAD YOU WRITTEN PLAYS BEFORE THE THREE O’CLOCK?
SR: That’s the longest play I’ve written to date. I’ve always enjoyed theater, and I’ve always been a writer, but I shied away from it. When I won the award, it was a moment of significance for me. Now, for better or worse, I’m a playwright.

VQ: WHAT WAS THE FIRST THING YOU EVER WROTE?
SR: I wrote a play called Camping in the fourth grade. It was performed at the Rothstein Family Passover Seder that year. I was the director, the costumer, the makeup artist. It was a little play about my family on a camping trip. The first thing I wrote that had any significance outside the Rothstein family was a 10-minute play I wrote sophomore year, called Evolutionary Psychology.

VQ: WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?
SR: I wrote and produced an independent television pilot for the New York on Television Festival. I’ve also written screenplays, but I think my style is satirical enough that I would have to find a really courageous filmmaker to take it on.

I’m a member of the Youngblood Playwriting Group, a collective for emerging playwrights at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. In the fall I will be attending Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in dramatic writing, and I’m very excited. I’m working on a docudrama about diabetes. What writers did for the public dialogue about HIV/AIDS—can’t we replicate that for another epidemic?

Sri Gordon ’01

Winner 2001
Faust(s)

Sri Gordon '01
Sri Gordon '01
VQ: HOW DID YOU COME TO WRITE FAUST(S)?
SG: I don’t see myself as a playwright; I think of myself as an actress. But for my senior project I wanted to do something more challenging than act a part in a play and write a paper about it. The drama department theme for that year was about Shakespeare, his contemporaries and their adapters. The year before I had been to the British American Drama Academy and played the part of Mephistopheles in Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, and originally I wanted to write my own version of Faust. But I’d never written a full length play, so instead I wrote an adaptation of Stein’s play, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Goethe’s Faust, using lines from each and also my own dialogue. I did my best to make my play stand on its own, with its own super text, but it also references those other plays.

VQ: ARE YOU STILL WRITING PLAYS?
SG: After Vassar I taught in Manhattan at the Stephen Gaynor School, for children with learning disabilities. I wrote plays for them — plays I thought would make them feel comfortable and validated. For instance, in The Leprechaun that Liked Wearing Blue, two of the seven kids told me, “I have stage fright. If you make a play, please don’t give me any lines.” So I made one of the characters, the Great Leprechaun, too lofty to speak—he spoke through his assistant—and the other silent character was the protagonist’s sidekick.

The last play I wrote was In Search of Hooziwhats and Other Alien Life Forms, in 2005. One afternoon, painting nine basketballs silver in lieu of astronaut helmets, I thought, “What am I doing? Why aren’t I at an audition?” It was hard for me to give up teaching, because I really loved those kids. But I’d just turned 26, and I decided that for the next three years I was going to give acting everything I have. If, at the end of three years, it hasn’t worked out, I’ll go to graduate school and get my master’s degree and be a teacher. But I have to try.

VQ: WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE $500 FROM THE AWARD?
SG: Headshots.

Rob Grace ’00

Winner 2000
Paper Hearts and Suffern

Rob Grace '00
Rob Grace '00
VQ: PAPER HEARTS AND SUFFERN: INTRIGUING TITLES.
RG: They’re both dark comedies that take place in suburban neighborhoods. They’re somewhat personal plays, about people grappling with their dark inner desires while attempting to maintain façades of normalcy. I think I was writing about what I had observed growing up. Paper Hearts involves two brothers, one of whom has left home to pursue a business career, while the other is still sorting out his life. Suffern is about a divorced mother living with her teenage son. Suffern was produced as a reading by a student theater group; Paper Hearts I wrote for my senior project, and it was produced at Avery. After Vassar, Suffern was produced at Expanded Arts in New York City and also at the Kitchen Sink Festival, which nominated it for best play.

VQ: YOU’VE BEEN VERY ACTIVE IN THEATER SINCE YOU GRADUATED.
RG: I’ve been pursuing playwriting and acting. In 2001, I founded a company in New York City called Studio 42, with Vassar classmates Bradford Louryk, Alison Albeck Lindland, Jen Winemen, Dan Golub, and Devon Berkshire, and the first production was Paper Hearts. The company’s mission is to present new plays; it rents various spaces and produces three or four productions each year.

It was quite a challenge to start. The majority of the work we do involves fundraising; that’s the most difficult part of running a theater. But we were all really great friends, so it just made sense to combine resources. Ultimately I would like to make my living both writing and acting. I’m pursuing all routes right now.

Trevor Oswalt ’99

Winner 1999
Young Boys Under Hot, Hot Lights

Trevor Oswalt '99
Trevor Oswalt '99
VQ: WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO VASSAR?
TO: I was looking at Vassar and Colorado College. Very different schools, right? I called Vassar to ask a question about drama or film or something and got the switchboard. The next thing I know, Professor Jim Steerman is on the phone. I don’t know who he is, and he starts rattling on about why Vassar is better. It was amazing that some professor who was late for class would take 15 minutes to talk to a prospective student. Vassar really shaped who I am now.

VQ: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PLAY?
TO: The plays I’ve written have all been solo pieces, including Young Boys Under Hot, Hot Lights. It’s kind of autobiographical. It chronicles the main character, Phineas, going through the Boy Scouts, from Cub Scout to Eagle Scout. (I’m an Eagle Scout, so I had a lot of material to draw on.) The piece was kind of linear — it went through his life, through all the different ranks—and it had lots of different characters: the ScoutMaster, Phineas’ mother, his father. It was my first play. This crazy little play about Boy Scouts. And I had this crazy Boy Scout uniform with a million little patches.

VQ: HAVE YOU EVER PERFORMED THIS PIECE AGAIN?
TO: No. I wrote two more pieces that I performed: Stichomythia, my final project at graduate school (I got an M.F.A. from the ART/MXAT Institute at Harvard University), and Eject, which is 80 minutes of me and a tape recorder, telling about the stages of a relationship: the infatuation, the maturation, when things break down, and the aftermath, the remorse.

VQ: I SEE FROM YOUR WEBSITE THAT YOU’RE ALSO A PHOTOGRAPHER.
TO: I started doing headshots and production shots to make money so I can do other stuff. I used to live in Soho in this tiny, tiny apartment, and I was working at this caf� making minimum wage—right after 9/11, right after grad school. And that was a hard time. I wanted something that would give me the time and the money just to write and act and do music.

Ever since Eject, my writing has gone toward music and stories for songs. I wasn’t really writing much music until I got to Vassar; it was all those Steinways sitting around, I guess. Now it’s my main interest. I have a group called Lost Tricks. We have one album, and I’m working on a new one. It’s not easy; you have to get attention, and the only way to do that is through perseverance. At the end of the day, it’s 90 percent persistence and 10 percent luck. So I’m just plugging away, trying to make things happen.

Green ’69 is an author, editor, theater critic, and teacher with a special interest in theater and women’s history. She lives in New York City.

To read a full transcript of the award recipients’ interviews, please go to the Online Additions section of this issue.