New York — For those of us who are not planning to become doctors, lawyers or i-bankers the future is particularly fuzzy. That’s why it was such a thrill to discover a group of artsy-fartsy recent Duke grads in New York that have thrown caution to the wind and taken their future into their own hands.
In the dog-eat-dog world of New York City theater, Talya Klein, Julie Foh and Faran Krentcil have found a safe haven. Last September, the three former theater studies majors came together with a handful of other theater faithfuls to form Scriptworks NY, a playwriting group dedicated to nurturing original work by new, young writers. Often artists are forced to choose between passion and pragmatism in order to make a decent living, but Scriptworks NY, while meeting regularly, curtails its schedule to the demands of its members’ day jobs, allowing these burgeoning writers to find a balance between art and the demands of everyday life. “Having a support network of like-minded artists,” Foh explained, “[has] provided the necessary impetus to keep writing.” And write they do.
Every other week, the members of Scriptworks NY meet to discuss their writing progress. Those who have new works ready to share hand over their latest pages to another member of the group who then reads the pages out loud so that the writer may hear the words from a voice other than his or her own. After the reading, the group discusses the progress of the piece by offering suggestions and constructive criticism. Once a writer has revised a piece to a point where it is performable, Scriptworks NY uses its few but quality resources to stage a reading of the piece at a theatrical venue with real actors.
Scriptworks NY held its first such presentation Oct. 9 at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, where they performed Krentcil’s latest play, Concordia, a mystical fable about a young woman who is the last scion of a dying breed of sirens. Eventually, Scriptworks NY would like to hold an entire festival of works written by its members, including full-scale productions.
As a forum for new work, Scriptworks NY encourages its members to indulge in the extravagance of process by experimenting with style, form, theme and content. This liberty, however, makes no demands for greatness, at least not initially. “It’s great to have a place where you don’t feel like you need to impress anybody, where you’re just there for the work,” Krentcil, who is a former senior editor of Recess, confessed.
The ultimate goal for each writer is to hone a piece or two to such a degree that it can serve as a kind of calling card with which the author can query agents, companies and festivals in the ultimate hope of catching a producer’s attention.
For Klein, Scriptworks NY is the first step in fulfilling her ultimate dream of starting her own theater company. “I’m dedicated to expanding the canon of new works for the stage,” Klein said, alluding to Broadway’s zeal for staging revivals of classic plays and musicals rather than mounting original, contemporary works.
This devotion to new work may have developed while Klein, Foh and Krentcil studied theater at Duke. Despite the general ignorance Duke students hold towards the campus theater scene, the University’s Department of Theater Studies sets itself apart from most other undergraduate theater programs in the country with its deliberate focus on the development of new work. In addition to the Theater Previews and Professional Readings series, which annually bring new professional works-in-progress to the Duke community, there are at least three local theater companies run by Duke professors (Man Bites Dog, Shakespeare’s Originals and Archipelago)that are also dedicated to fostering new work.
Perhaps the most unique example of support for new work here at Duke is the annual New Works Festival, held every spring as the culmination of a semester-long workshop course in which students work together to write, direct and stage a handful of short student-written plays.
“The future of theater lies in the development of new work, not restaging the classics,” said Jeff Storer, creative director of the Man Bites Dog theater company and one of the professors team teaching the New Works workshop this year. “Here at Duke,” he said, “we are absolutely inundated with new work.”
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