When I
teach playwriting classes to high school students, one of my favorite plays to share with them is Gregory Fletcher’s Stairway
to Heaven, which won the 2004 National Ten-Minute Play Award at the Kennedy
Center’s American College Theatre Festival.
Students
connect to the play – about two teenaged siblings on the morning of their
father’s funeral – because the characters are instantly familiar (and their
interaction so real) to them. The play’s dialogue is simple, but layered; its
structure is very clear; it is funny, sad, sweet, and true – a terrific play to
talk about with first-time playwrights. My group at the Academy of the Pacific
Rim in Hyde Park, where I am mentoring students for the Massachusetts Young Playwrights’
Project this year, is no exception. They loved it. [Random suggestion: I also
like pairing this play with Walt McGough’s Two
Socks Discuss Loss, to show students two very different ways of illustrating
onstage the ways we move through grief and into the future. Steal this idea!]
