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Dwight/Edgewood Playwrights Hit The Cabaret Big Time

by Paul Bass | Nov 9, 2006 11:10 am

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Posted to: Arts

She lives on Winthrop Avenue and attends Troup Magnet Academy of Science Middle School. He goes to Yale Drama School. They met Wednesday at a festive pre-opening night party for a new play about competitive high-school girls—her new play.

Tanaisha Doughty and Jason Fitzgerald (left to right in photo) connected at the Yale Cabaret for the dress rehearsal of “Dwight/ Edgewood 2006: 6 original comedies by 6 New Haven teens about friendship, family, and innocence lost.”

Or, more precisely, Doughty and Fitzgerald re-connected. That’s the inspiring script of the story behind the comedies playing Thursday through Saturday nights at the intimate Park Street theater. (Click here for details on times and prices.)

Every summer the Yale drama students who run the Cabaret spend weeks with 16 seventh and eighth-graders from the Dwight and Edgewood neighborhoods who attend Troup and are interested in playwriting. They form two-person teams matching a drama student with a Troup kid; Doughty, a seventh-grader, was matched with Fitzgerald, a second-year student in dramaturgy. The teams work together developing an original play by the Troup student. The whole crew goes on a two-night campaign trip, then follows the plays hatched there through rewriting and staging back in New Haven. They perform the plays in the summer. Then, in the fall, the Yale Cabaret crew does a professional-caliber staging of some of the plays.

Hence the current Thursday-Saturday run.

It’s a glowing example of how small-scale town-gown efforts make New Haven a richer place. It benefits not just the neighborhood kids and the Yalies, but the audience-goers, as Wednesday night’s dress rehearsal made clear. The sketches are a delight to watch.

Part of the secret is the approach. The subtitle would make you think that the kids would be pigeonholed into writing cliched, gritty real-life dramas about growing up in tough neighborhoods, as befits your basic earnest “art” in the urban community program. But these plays roam far through wilds of the young teens’ imaginations, the broader terrain common to kids of all backgrounds. The characters and the settings of these plays—a girl-snatching “Mr. Combover” working in a diaper factory, an evil force-dispatched dog disrupting the domestic life of a rural couple—are fresher, more universal, as a result.

In other words, the kids are allowed to reach rather than serve as scripted surrogates for the do-gooders’ preconceived notions of urban life.

“This made me want to be a playwright,” said Nyah Macklin (pictured), creator of the haplessly venal Mr. Combover. “It’s a lot of fun. You can make it whatever you want. There are no limits. It’s your imagination; you can let it run.”

Tanaisha Doughty got her idea for “The Internship” from the process of getting into the Dwight/Edgewood Yale Cabaret program itself. You have to work hard, earn top grades, and compete with other students. She transferred that notion to a high-school setting in her play, and took it to comical extremes. A snotty rich girl and and a frumpier classmate battle like cats to win an internship, college scholarship included, at a leading fashion magazine. Call it Mean Girls meets The Devil Wears Prada.

Not only does a middle-schooler (Taniasha) need to put herself in the frame of mind of a high-schooler in “The Internship.” The grad students performing it have to return to the mindset of their high-school days to play their parts.

For a glimpse of the results, click on the play arrow.

Wednesday’s night’s dress rehearsal doubled as a celebration for the student playwrights and their families. They received a stipend and Yale pens and Barnes and Noble gift cards courtesy of sponsors, which included Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs. Pizza House supplied the pies, Greek salad and garlic bread.

The Dwight/Edgewooders’ families came along to celebrate, eat and watch the performance. Tanaisha’s 5 year-old brought Nquan was among them.

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