The glamorous life of a playwright

As I stared at the peeling purple-painted walls of the Aladdin Hotel, I realized that Young Playwrights Inc. wasn't kidding when it said it would give eight winning playwrights the New York City theater experience.

Five people to a bedroom, a bathroom door always half an inch ajar, a non-functioning heater and German models shrieking with laughter down the hall — ah, yes, the artist's life. "La Vie Boheme," as the cast of "Rent" sang lustily during the performance we saw the evening of our arrival. I rubbed the lamp, and the genie gave me exactly what I wished for. I was a winner of the National Young Playwrights Festival.

Young Playwrights Inc., founded by musical composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, is an organization devoted to putting on the works of young playwrights, ages 18 and under. I am not 18 or under, I admit, but I was when I submitted my one-act play, "Welcome Home, Virginia Woolf."

After two years of silence, I was shocked this past summer to learn that no, my play had not been relegated to the bottom of a "Thanks, but no thanks!" pile. I won, after eight years of trying.

I had been submitting plays since I was in the fifth grade, and my gifted and talented teacher handed me a poster that read: "You have a right to remain silent. NOT."

"Wayne's World" references aside, I was enchanted by the content of the poster. It explained the guidelines for the National Young Playwrights' Festival Playwriting Contest and the prize — a week in New York seeing professional theater and attending a reading of your work with professional actors.

This year the week, officially known as the Writer's Conference, took place — through some miracle of fate — during Princeton's Fall Break. The eight winners were bussed, shipped, flown and ferried to the Big Apple and sat, our first evening, staring at one another, avoiding our mandatory journal assignment.

Mandatory journal assignment? I had not been assigned journal entries since fifth grade. "Write down your impressions of your fellow playwrights." Fellow playwrights? I began to realize that this was for real. For a week, we were all professional playwrights. For one week, with $50 royalties and accommodations in an underwhelming hotel packed to the gills with starving artists, we were in the business.

Of course, real playwrights aren't taken to the theater for free, unless, of course, they wrote the play. And we went to the theater for free, every night of our stay, and not only for our own readings. From the popular musical "Rent" to a hysterical Off-Broadway one-man show called "Fully Committed." From the whimsical "Seussical" to the heady, intellectual "Copenhagen." We were inundated with theater.

Though "All the things you can think when you think about Seuss!" may not seem an appropriate bedfellow for a play that discusses the uncertainty principle, the experience of seeing all these plays in one week was not only dazzling, it was inspiring.

Better still, after each performance, we met the people involved in the production. After "Fully Committed," we spoke to the show's star, Roger Bart, who won a Tony for his performance as Snoopy in "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown."

We met the composer and lyricist of "Seussical," Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, and we spoke with the cast of "Copenhagen" — not to mention sitting on stage for the performance, which, while tremendously uncomfortable, leant a whole new perspective to witnessing a play. It is a disconcerting feeling to see the actors' backs during curtain call.

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During the day, we attended playwriting classes and rehearsals of our own work, frantically learning the workings of the New York subway system, if we didn't know them already. Each playwright came from a completely different background and a completely different perspective — from an African-American comedic playwright from urban Philadelphia hoping to break into the movies, to an Arizona student taking her college courses via the Internet, working a job at a child-care center by day and running lights at a local theater at night. As we attended these classes, we learned about each other and about the craft of playwriting.

Finally, it was time for the readings of our work. Daisy Eagan, a Tony award-winning actress — my favorite performer in childhood, who is almost exactly my own age — was playing the lead in my play. I remembered watching her on Broadway when we were both about 11 years old and thinking that if someone my age could do that, there was no end to the things I could do.

I remembered, with surprise, that the year I saw Daisy Eagan on Broadway was the same year I began submitting plays to the National Young Playwrights' Festival. Poetic justice — or theatrical justice, as the case might be. Now, here she was, in my play, along with a phenomenal cast of professional actresses. I had written words that Daisy Eagan was about to read.

I thought back to the beginning of my week, of staring with dismay at the Aladdin Hotel, a hotel that Tony-winning and Oscar-winning writer and Young Playwrights Inc. president Alfred Uhry told us over a Chinese dinner was a whorehouse "back in the day," and I smiled. As I looked over the faces of so many friends and family who had traveled for hours just to see my work, I realized that this really was "La Vie Boheme." And I was proud to be a part of it.

Catherine Keyser '01 is an English major from Sea Girt, N.J. She can be reached at cekeyser@princeton.edu.