Courtesy of the Yale Playwrights Festival

The Yale Playwrights Festival 2022, held earlier this month, featured a staging of five student-written plays each accompanied by its own reading. 

The 2022 Yale Playwrights Festival featured student written plays by Zoe Larkin ’24, Charlotte Foote ’22, Sarah Valeika ’22, Aaron Magloire ’23 and Isa Dominguez ’24. The festival had limited in-person audiences and virtual readings of each play. Each reading was followed by a talkback with the playwright, director and the playwrights’ mentors. 

“Creating something is mortifying, and hearing it aloud for the first time is always equal parts exhilarating and excruciating,” Larkin said regarding her play, entitled “This is Nice.” “I was fortunate to have a talented cast of extremely funny and extremely game performers, so the reading felt like a safe space to experiment and play with the script.”

Each playwright had to submit a first draft of their script by Nov. 29 in order to be considered for the festival. Toni Dorfman, co-creator of the festival and Yale College Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, said that the most difficult part of the consideration process was reading all of the submissions and having them judged by at least two judges within the two and a half weeks before the YPF program was announced. This past year there were 34 submissions, said Dorfman, but the festival has received up to 50 submissions in past years. 

The judges are a “collection of practitioners, critics and scholars, all mostly at Yale” who are asked to judge the scripts on whether they contain “life” or not, said Dorfman. 

The festival was created by Dorfman and co-creator Laura Jacqmin ’04 in 2003, who received the 2008 Wendy Wasserstein Prize for emerging female playwrights. 

Of this year’s playwrights, Foote wrote “Ghost Fruit” for her thesis in the writing concentration for the English major. Alongside her thesis advisor, Foote came to understand plays as “embodied possessions.” When it came to writing the actual play she asked herself questions such as, “What are the questions that feel most urgent to me in this moment? What’s obsessing me? What’s taking up the most space in my mind and body?” 

The thought of sharing her work for the first time for a larger audience initially “daunted” Foote. 

“When you share your work, you release it into the hands and minds of so many,” she said. “They can do with it what they will.” 

But once she watched her work become “something shared,” she was grateful for the “beautiful” process, she said. 

Larkin wanted to challenge herself in the playwriting process by simultaneously bringing in sincerity and comedy into her work. 

“But ultimately, I am smitten with the defense mechanism of humor and the play does reflect that!” she said. 

Hearing her audience laugh was “invaluable,” as was guidance from her mentors, Ali Viterbi ’14 and professor Daniel Egan. They assisted her with keeping her characters “grounded and real” through the events she put them through, Larkin said. 

Each reading was allowed four hours maximum of rehearsal time with minimal stage directions “to enhance the clarity, power, and rhythm of the dialogue,” Dorfman said. 

Chesed Chap ’25 played “Sweetheart,” a 21-year old outspoken and unapologetic college student, in Larkin’s play. According to Chap, “Sweetheart” struggles with loving her family amid the challenges of having them understand her as a queer woman.

“Performing in the festival gave me the space to be introspective about myself as an actress; since there was no blocking, we could really sink into the script and how we could present the characters’ complex relationships through a textual lens,” Chap said. 

Chap said that being a part of the play written by Larkin — a fellow member of her sketch comedy group — was “rewarding,” and she found particular enjoyment in being able “to flesh out some of the techniques we use in sketch in a theatrical setting.” 

Other plays included Valeika’s “Between Fitful Sleeps,” Magloire’s “Juba, or Jump!” and Dominguez’s “Mango.”

“Mango” was loosely based on Dominguez’s own family in Doral, Florida, and specifically her late uncle. Inspired by the profile she wrote on him for her ENGL 120 class, Dominguez “couldn’t stop thinking about him” and decided in December 2020 to write her first scene.

Her mentors, Tencha Avila and Margaret Spillane, pushed her to make the “jumble of scenes” that she had into a “story,” Dominguez said. Spillane, a faculty member of the Yale English Department, described Dominguez as “what Henry James had in mind when he praised ‘a person upon whom nothing is lost.’” 

“Isa writes good dialogue because she’s a good listener,” Spillane said. 

Dominguez remarked that the director of her play, Catherine Alam-Nist ’24, helped her realize the bigger picture of the work and how to ensure that the actors onstage were comfortable. She also said that it was important to her that most of the actors were Latino. 

“Having mentors, a director and actors, I realized that playwriting is a very collaborative process,” Dominguez said. “That, ultimately is why this meant more to me than any article or essay, because I saw the impact it had on everyone. I could see it and live with it and truly enjoy it.”

The Yale Playwright Festival 2022 occurred from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19. 

PALOMA VIGIL
Paloma Vigil is the Arts Editor for the Yale Daily News. She previously served as a DEI co-chair and staff reporter for the University and Sports desks. Past coverage includes religious life, Yale College Council, sailing and gymnastics. Originally from Miami, she is a junior in Pauli Murray College majoring in Psychology and Political Science.