Playwriting 360 at HSPVA

Marisa Rinchiuso welcomes the audience and starts off the event. Playwright Gina Cook is seen in white on the right. (Photo: Savanna Lim)

Every year, the Alley Theatre and The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts team up to produce a collaborated staged reading between the Level III Theatre students and the Sophomore Creative Writing Students. The event is set up as thus: From a pool of 50 total plays submitted from the above stated Theatre and Creative Writing students, three from each group are selected to be read by the Theatre students in HSPVA’s Black Box.

This collaboration would not have been possible had it not been for Ms. Elizabeth Keele, who is from the Alley Theatre and is a consultant to both the Creative Writing and Theatre departments.

This year featured plays from Leina Betzar, Mallory Miller, and Gina Cook (Level III Theatre) along with Olivia Cardenas, Hannah Wolfe, and Bridget Fenner (ophomore Creative Writing), with plays ranging from (for mature audiences only) the predicament between two random people who have inconveniently chosen the same rooftop to jump off of, the harrowing reality of white over black during segregation, what happens when you attempt to babysit a delinquent genius who both refuses to put on pants and brush his teeth, and the argument of whether a human can survive three days or weeks without water.

Without a doubt, all the plays were attention grabbing, sitting in the Black Box, where all the focus is on the actors with the expert positioning of lights (managed by Paris Bezanis). To put the whole reading in a word, it would be “beautiful” because there a myriad of emotions, none of them meshing into an unrecognizable collage, but remained contrasted and sharp, remaining strictly within their own plays and scoring deep gashes on the audiences heart.