New talent: Young Playwrights' Festival.

New York's Young Playwrights' Festival is in its eleventh season and, to my discredit, I have gone to a program for the first time this year. I did try back in 1990, as a curious playgoer not as a reviewer, but there was not a seat to be had-- not even for ready money. The YPF has its loyal supporters. I wanted then to see Allison Birch's Believing, which I had read and seen performed in Philadelphia, and to see how a play that I liked held its own among the winners of the national competition for playwrights, eighteen and under. Very well, from all reports.

If I have been derelict on the national level, I have at least been keeping an eye on the Philadelphia Young Playwrights' Festival since 1988, when the program was first instituted. The Philadelphia Inquirer (May 27, 1988) ran a story about the young playwrights at Simon Gratz High School in North Philadelphia. A snippet of dialogue from one of the plays so impressed me that I wrote to the teacher in charge, Marsha Pincus (who understandably keeps winning teaching awards), and asked if I could see the play. She sent me a copy of "Plays in Progress" (a name that the Theatre Communications Group uses for the work of more exalted dramatists) so that I could see the first year's work. Under the program, the teacher teases plays from interested students and the young writers work with a local playwright (Rufus Caleb at Gratz); there are staged readings at each school and the winners go on to a city-wide festival. Gratz is a large inner-city school in a tough neighborhood (one of the playwrights was killed by a bullet meant for someone else), and the playwrights there deal straightforwardly or comically or sentimentally with drugs, drink, sex, and abuse inside and outside the family. As the PYPF became better known and better financed, it spread to other schools-- suburban schools, private schools--and a certain sophistication about how plays are made has surfaced in the results. Although I wish all the young playwrights well, I remain a Gratz fan because the program there allows students with practically no experience of theater to expose their fears and longings, their street language and odd lyricism, and, then, as the play is worked and reworked with the advice of outside readers, teachers, playwrights, directors, to find a shape for what they want to say.

If I had come cold to the festival in New York and seen Terrance Jenkin's Taking Control, I would have recognized it as a Simon Gratz play. Both he and Allison Birch are Gratz alumni. He first submitted the play to the New York festival in 1990 and, after reworking it so thoroughly that it is almost a new piece, had it accepted for this season's program. It begins with an idealized family scene, variations of which punctuate the otherwise realistic play. It concerns three young girls who live with their foul-mouthed, abusive, alcoholic grandmother. Tarae, the middle child, is the strongest of the three, the one who tries to take control, to deal with her older sister who has become pregnant at sixteen. Structured in brief scenes, like a television drama (TV is a major influence on most Gratz play-wrights), it allows Tarae to confront her father, a drunk whose response to any disquieting demand on him is violence or the threat of violence; her mother, who has become a prostitute (a classy house, not a street corner) in search of the life that she missed as a teen-age mother; and her grandmother, who collapses into helplessness when the family pattern seems to be repeating itself.

The final image is of the three girls, sharing an embrace, giving one another the love and support that they have not found elsewhere. The happy ending is one of the characteristics of Gratz plays in their first incarnations, whether the playwright is being led by the example of television or by a longing for benign solutions to seemingly impossible problems, but Jenkins has gone beyond the easy out, the positive summing-up. His play ends in ambiguity. Tarae is so attractive a character that one would like her to have the strength to take control, but the evidence of the play itself suggests that she and her sisters are a new generation of victims. The play may be impelled more by a need to demonstrate (one exemplary scene after another) than by dramatic necessity, but the scenes are vivid and Jenkins has created a remarkable character in the grandmother--frightening, brutally funny, pathetic--particularly as played by Novella Nelson.

Taking Control is an odd play out in the festival. The others are obviously theatrical pieces. Aurorae Khoo's The P.C. Laundromat is a satirical fable in which the couple who run the laundromat--all fast patter and fancy footwork--appear to embrace the multicultural, multiracial society, but--as their laundry lesson for a young Asian-American woman indicates--they wash away diversity. Joanna Norland's Mothers Have Nine Lives consists of nine often very funny monologue sketches (played by three performers) which present a variety of mothers, from the indifferent to the overworked. The pieces are joined by the frenetic activity of two little girls playing "Mommy," a device that quickly becomes tiresome and which seems to be there only for the final ironic complaint of the little girl forced to play the child that being Mommy is the best.

Robert Levy's Mrs. Neuberger's Dead is in some ways the most intriguing of the four plays--certainly the most elusive, the most opaque. It is about an unemployed drug-taking dropout and his girlfriend, fresh from alcohol rehab, who live in a derelict apartment in New York, middle-class young people driven toward self-destruction by something not as clearly defined as are the social forces in Taking Control. They are invaded by an amiable Bible salesman, a self-proclaimed prophet who sleeps with the young man and tells them that the end of the world is at hand. They wait, half in anticipation, half in regret, but when the promised end does not come, they seem to reach tentatively toward reconstruction individually and as a couple. A final complicitous look between the prophet and a young woman with whom the girl has slept at the rehab center suggest that they are some kind of guardian figures from a raunchief T.S. Eliot comedy. They are played by black actors although there is nothing in the script to suggest that their blackness is significant to their mission (perhaps it is simply color-blind casting), and the redemptive power of same-sex copulation is a little obscure. I would hate to have to explicate the play--including the bizarre and perhaps imaginary suicide that gives the work its title-but onstage it is a vigorous, funny, obscene, and occasionally annoying and it hints at a positive spiritual underlay. It is either parodic seriousness or serious parody.

As a whole, the program offers four accomplishments and four promises.