The Play’s the Thing: 'Discovery Arkansas' to Promote Talents of Area High School Playwrights

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Southern white sharecroppers, an uptight reporter who meets a ghostly thug from Al Capone’s gang and a family separated during the great Mississippi flood are among the characters four young playwrights will bring to life and to the stage during the New Play Festival this spring.

David Jolliffe, the Brown Chair in English Literacy in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and TheatreSquared, Northwest Arkansas’ only residential professional theater company, have conceived the “Discovery Arkansas” project. Their goal: to support high school playwrights in creating new scripts that will then be performed by trained actors from the university’s drama department and TheatreSquared.

Clinnesha Dillon, who is working on a master of fine arts degree in Fulbright College, is mentoring four playwrights from high schools in Arkansas as they develop their scripts from brief narratives into one-act plays ready to be performed. They have begun working on their scripts, which will bring some aspect of Arkansas history and culture to life.

Mary Browning, an 18-year-old student at Augusta High School in Woodruff County, is creating The Devil’s Oven. Set in 1942, the play tells the story of Lois Brown, a woman struggling to keep her gardens alive in the throes of a powerful drought that has hit the Arkansas Delta.

Stephen Kennedy, a 17-year-old student at Bentonville High School, is writing Mineral Water Cures All! in which an uptight reporter will be axed if he doesn’t meet a deadline. He checks into a room at the historic Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, where his work is interrupted by the ghost of one of Al Capone’s vicious enforcers.

Audrey LeBert, a 17-year-old student at Rogers High School, is creating Anna’s Flood, about the daughter of Southern white sharecroppers in 1942. Separated from her family during the great Mississippi flood, Anna meets a young African American girl named Rosie, and their ensuing friendship forms the focus of the play.  

Morgan Mansour, a 17-year-old Fayetteville High School student, is writing Open House, the story of a grieving Arkansas mother who pays her young daughter a surprise visit in a large Northern city.

The New Play Festival will be held March 27 and 28. The preceding week, faculty and theater professionals from the English department, drama department and TheatreSquared will work with the writers and trained actors to prepare for staged readings of their works during the festival at the Nadine Baum Studios in the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville.

For more information about TheatreSquared’s Arkansas New Play Festival and performance times, go to www.theatresquared.org or call 479-445-6333.