Justice System Yields Playwrights
From San Mateo Daily News, May 13, 2002, with the publisher's permission
By John Angell Grant

This week the San Mateo County juvenile justice system will give birth to 20 new one-act plays written by 20 new Peninsula youth playwrights.

Professional actors will perform readings of these plays on Friday at Hillcrest Juvenile Hall in San Mateo and Thornton Continuation High School in Daly City.

This ingenious youth playwriting program is a collaboration between the San Mateo County Office of Education for Court and Community Schools, and a creative, 4-year-old San Mateo nonprofit theater arts program called Each One Reach One.

The program focuses on youth who are struggling and often enmeshed in the juvenile justice system. Many of the participating youth playwrights are on probation, according to Robin Sohnen, founder and director of Each One Reach One. Some are incarcerated in juvenile hall. Others attend continuation high school because regular high school has not worked well for them.

The program's goals are to empower disaffected youth and to build self-esteem through developing the belief that what they have to say is important.

The youth theater program follows a two-week cycle that repeats eight or 10 times a year. During a given two-week, cycle, the budding playwrights meet with professional theater mentors for two hours ad ay, for 10 weekdays.

During Week One, they spend the first hour each day doing theater games and improv, learning to find characters, conflict and story ideas. The second hour they spend one-on-one with a theater mentor getting dialog and story ideas down on paper, and learning the craft of playwriting.

Week Two is then spent one-on-one with a single mentor generating a one-act play. The only direction given to students during script development is that they create two characters who come into conflict and find a resolution in one act.

The youth do all the writing. The program is strict about that, and does not permit mentors to do any of the writing. Out of this process comes a one-act play, usually between three and five minutes long. On the 10th and final day of the cycle, Each One Reach One brings in a pool of additional professional actors. They spend 90 minutes rehearsing each play, and then perform it.

The performance is a reading, where the actors sit in chairs and read from the script. The emphasis is on the youth playwright's words.

Sohnen founded the program four years ago after meeting youth who became trapped in the justice system for long periods of time extending well into their adulthoods. She has a background in theater and at the time produced video games for such clients as Sega.

"In the mentoring program (the youth) achieve something that's impossible," said Sohnen. "They write a play."

The hope, she adds, is that the next time these alienated youth face something that seems impossible, they will remember this experience and realize that nothing is impossible, they will remember this experienc eand realize that nothing is impossible, and that none of us has to do it alone.

© San Mateo Daily News
hosted by www.each1reach1.org

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