Plays written by kids, acted by pros

City Theatre Young Playwrights Festival Runs through Oct. 29 City Theatre’s Lester… City Theatre Young Playwrights Festival Runs through Oct. 29 City Theatre’s Lester Hamburg Studio 1300 Bingham St. 412-431-2489 Tickets: $7 with valid student ID

Each year, middle school and high school students from all over the Pittsburgh area are given a chance to see the one-act plays they’ve written performed by professional actors and actresses.

This year’s Young Playwrights Festival celebrates the eighth year that City Theatre opens up its stage to students in the Pittsburgh area.

Last year, City Theatre’s education department sent six professional playwrights to 12 local Pittsburgh schools as “teaching artists” to run workshops that taught students about theater and play writing.

Students in turn were given the assignment to write plays of their own and were given the option of submitting their plays to the Young Playwrights Contest.

Though the majority of the submitted plays were from these 12 schools, City Theatre also received scripts from 23 additional schools that were not assigned “teaching artists.”

Finalist Matthew Spinnewebber became involved in the Young Playwrights when his school hosted one of the workshops.

Writing a play was a required assignment for his English class, but the decision to submit the play for judging was left to the students.

In a recent telephone interview, Spinnewebber described working on the plays in class as a positive experience and said that he benefited from the contributions of his classmates who “all worked together and gave each other ideas.”

Describing the Young Playwrights Festival, City Theatre’s director of education, Linus Craig, said, “It’s an exciting program, because playwriting was considered an older person’s field in the 1800s through the early 20th century. We’ve done a 180 as a society and we’re now paying attention to plays written by younger people.”

After the six winners were chosen from 176 submitted scripts, they benefited from all the resources City Theatre had to offer to improve their scripts.

One of the major assets that was made available to them was the assistance of dramaturges, who are essentially professional playwrights who worked with the students one on one over the summer to edit and improve their plays.

In a radio interview with the Saturday Light Brigade on Sunday, finalist David Jimenez described his personal experience working with a dramaturge.

“[We] went over the script many, many times to figure out what we wanted to do with it,” Jimenez said. “We had at least 11 or 12 drafts.”

Of the winning plays, the three written by middle school students were “Art Smarts,” by eighth-grader Margaret Saunders from Christ the Divine Teacher Catholic Academy; “By Blood Alone,” by Jimenez, a current Shadyside Academy freshman; and “The Royal Pet,” by Spinnewebber, a South Hills Middle School eighth grader.

The topics of the plays are all very different and vary greatly in tone and subject. Saunders’ “Art Smarts,” is about a rivalry between two young artists that teaches the girls about themselves, their art, and each other.

Contrastingly, Jimenez’s play, “By Blood Alone” deals with serious topics like the ups and downs of capitalism and communism and the importance of family and country in the midst of political turmoil in Hungary.

Spinnewebber’s play tells the whimsical story of a young squire who learns the value and merit of honesty along the way to becoming a knight.

The finalists in the high school division of the competition, Emma Wagner, Bridget Liddell and Olivia O’Conner, also cover a broad range of topics in their respective plays, “Enlightenment,” “Inside the Bookstore” and “To Catch a Fish.”

Wagner wrote her play “Enlightenment,” last year when she was a senior at Mt. Lebanon High School.

Now a freshman at The Boston Conservatory for Musical Theatre, Wagner will see her murder mystery play about super sleuth Rusty Clubs performed on stage by professional actors.

Liddell, the writer of “Inside the Bookstore,” is a recent graduate of Riverview High School and currently a freshman at Chicago’s DePaul University.

“Inside the Bookstore” is about the unlikely pairing of an elderly bookstore owner named Thomas and a young troublemaker named Jay, sent to assist Thomas in his shop as a means of punishment.

The two must learn to overcome their own shortcomings in order to get along and work peacefully together.

Sixteen-year-old O’Conner is a junior at Knoch High School in Butler. Her play “To Catch a Fish,” is about two brothers, Johnny and Rob, who live in an impoverished area where the only sense of fun they find is in waiting for Rob’s pet fish to swim home every night.

When a bout of fortune smiles upon Johnny and offers him a chance to leave his depressing circumstances, he is tempted to leave but worries about abandoning his younger brother.

The school performances of these plays sold out last week on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday when teachers were invited to bring their students to the theater to see the plays.

This coming weekend the plays will be performed again for the public at the City Theatre on Bingham Street in the South Side.

High school performances will be on Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. and the middle school performances will be on Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m.

Student tickets can be bought for $7 by calling the box office at 412-431-CITY.