🎭 'You don't have to be a theater nerd to find success with PegasusThtrChi Young Playwrights Festival.' -A conversation with the three writers selected for the festival's 36th edition.|✍️ JackHelbig👇
From left: Elliott Valadez, Lucas Bigos and Jonathan Soco, the winning playwrights in the 36th Young Playwrights Festival at Pegasus Theatre ChicagoLucas Bigos was not a theater kid in high school—never in drama club, never in the school play. But something clicked his senior year at Lane Tech. That’s when he took a theater class at his high school to satisfy an elective requirement.
“I have not really had very much experience writing,” he admits, grinning. “I am not an English major. I am actually an aerospace major.” The play that got him into the festival,Like Bigos, he wrote the piece his senior year in a required elective course , at Whitney Young. “So we did everything from poetry to playwriting,” Valadez chirps, “and this [his winning play] was like our big final project at the end of the year.
For 36 years the Young Playwrights Festival has been working to guide would-be writers, kindle their creativity, and turn them into young playwrights. And then they showcase the best of the best in a full, professional production. Before the pandemic, Pegasus routinely received 800 or a thousand plays. “Teachers would drop off boxes of plays,” Pegasus Theatre Chicago artistic director Ilesa Duncan recalls, adding that the numbers declined during and after lockdown “This year we received 300 entries.” Volunteer theater professionals read the plays and write evaluations.
The workshop also loosened Valadez up. It was in the workshop that Valadez felt comfortable using his own experiences in his writing.
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