When Maria Welser entered “Snowglobes. Tattoos. Scars That Look Like Trees” into Beverly Arts Center’s inaugural New Playwrights’ Festival, more than anything she wanted to hear how her words would sound read by trained actors, and how a crowd might respond to a play she created to tackle topics such as depression.
“I’ve been looking forward to getting it out into the open,” Welser said.
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Welser, a 27-year-old Mokena native who lives in Chicago, is passionate about teaching and wants to continue that career. But she would love to write plays for the rest of her life, and if that can become a career — maybe that of a playwright professor — all the better, she said.
She earned some major theatrical credentials last month when she was named winner of the festival, with “Snowglobes” to receive a fully staged production July 29-31, 2022, at the center’s Wilcanic Studio Theatre.
“I found out at my parents’ house, and my sister and I just started screaming,” Welser said. “I still know it’s a long and challenging road ahead if I want to make playwriting a career, but this makes me feel like it has the potential of possibility.”
There were 77 plays submitted for the festival, with 11 selected to get readings on Beverly Arts Center’s stages, with a panel of jurors and judges guiding the process. Carly Bishop, who was the center’s artistic director until Friday, said Welser’s play resonated with contemporary challenges.
“Maria’s play speaks to a family dealing with depression during a time when mental health should be at the forefront of conversations,” Bishop said. “Her dialogue feels familiar with all of us spending much more time in our family pods during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Welser said the play was inspired by a friend’s family that lost someone to depression and suicide.
“I was thinking about how hard it’s got to be to do everything in your power to help somebody, and sometimes there’s not much that can be done,” Welser said.
Sometimes family members say things with the best of intentions but are not helping the situation, and Welser wanted to explore what gets lost in translation.
“I think it is a story people can connect to, whether you are somebody going through depression or anxiety, or whether you have a family member who is going through it,” Welser said. “I want people to see that families can have some things that they’re struggling with, but that doesn’t mean that they’re any less loving or unified.”
One of the actors who read “Snowglobes” opened up to Welser about their own struggles with depression and anxiety.
“That really resonated with me, because I want people who struggle with those things to realize that it’s not something that’s just them,” Welser said. “It’s kind of a sad play, but it’s more than the sadness. People are more than their struggles.”
Welser said just taking part in the festival was a rewarding experience, and she appreciates what the actors did to make the reading special.
“It really liked hearing it spoken in the words and mouths of actors, because I’d only heard it read by playwrights before,” she said. “It’s different when you have people who are really putting a lot of emotion and feeling into it.”
Welser’s start as playwright came as a Lincoln-Way East High School student. She said the theater program was typically well-funded for “one really good play a year.”
“The rest were plays we could afford,” Welser said. “There was one play we did and I was like, ‘Wow, I could write something better than this.’ And my friend was like, ‘Why don’t you?’ I started writing and I didn’t really stop, because I really liked creating stories.”
Welser competed once before, submitting her first play to the Goodman Latino Theater Festival in 2013. She wrote about a family that immigrated to the United States and was trying to keep their bond together as America’s fast-paced society tore them apart. She said whatever she does next will likely also focus on families, and how members relate to one another.
“I just like kitchen sink dramas,” Welser said. “I think I’m going to continue to write plays like that.”
Bishop said the New Playwrights’ Festival followed in the footsteps of the center’s successful annual fine arts competition. That gives artists an opportunity to win cash prizes and a showcase in a professional gallery.
“It was my intention to give artists in the performing arts the same opportunity and to provide a sense of ensemble and togetherness, which is at the very heart of theater, to lift us through the pandemic,” Bishop said.
Hope Campbell was one of the playwrights who seized the opportunity. The 22-year-old Chicago writer entered “The Poet in White,” a play about the posthumous publishing of Emily Dickinson’s poems. It was selected among the 11 that were read.
“This was I think the first time I had a play read by professional actors that I didn’t know,” Campbell said. “So this was a very cool experience.”
Campbell, originally from Massachusetts, went to the University of Chicago and decided to stay in the city. She started acting in third grade but also enjoyed writing stories and songs. In high school, she got interested in writing plays and penned “Take Me Dancing” with her twin sister.
“It was basically if a John Hughes movie were a play,” Campbell said. “It was the epitome of that 1980s brat pack story.”
It won an award, and Campbell was hooked. She was already an Emily Dickinson fan, but during a research assignment on the poet she learned about how the author’s poems had been edited, censored, revised and stolen after her death. She pursued advanced playwriting through a workshop with Calamity West and started developing “The Poet in White.”
“I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard it before and that no one had told it, that I hadn’t seen it dramatized anywhere,” Campbell said. “I think it’s a very relevant story in terms of talking about what happens to an author’s work after they die. What honors or privileges do we owe the dead?”
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Campbell has a full-time job for a nonprofit, but said she intends to continue writing plays.
“A lot of the scripts that I write tend to be about young women, queer women, mentally ill women, and them forging their own identities and making history,” Campbell said. “I would love for more of those stories to get out there.”
Kristina Newcomb is another East Coast transplant. Originally from Maine, the 23-year-old teaching assistant for the Beverly Arts Center entered “The Sometimes Accurate (But Mostly Inaccurate) History of the World,” a one-act play she cowrote with Isabella Van Houzen.
Newcomb said she was feeling angst about not having made a play as an actor during a 24-hour festival, so she tried her hand at creative writing. She crafted a 10-minute play called “Eve Was Constipated.”
“It told the story kind of backward about Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit,” Newcomb said. “I just thought it was hilarious that apples were so fibrous, and they say ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ I just put those two things together and thought it was really funny.”
Newcomb started working with Van Houzen and found they were generating similar ideas — and enough of them for a full play. So, they developed a comedy about a professor teaching her side of history, in contrast to what has been recorded for years through men’s eyes.
Bishop called the festival a total success.
“It gave 11 artists the opportunity to get their work out there, and seven actors, a director and a theater technician an opportunity to tell stories again after a long hiatus,” Bishop said. “They were ecstatic. It was like coming home to be in a theater again.”
Bill Jones is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.