Alex Ashworth '10
Deliverance Through Dialogue
Sometimes it’s only in hindsight that one sees the first glimmer of a talent. For Alex Ashworth, that glimmer is in a memory of spending time in her room as a young child doing scenarios with her stuffed animals. As a young playwright, she uses human actors instead of stuffed animals to create more complex scenarios.
“I’ve always been interested in stories that involve relationships between people, that explore how people think and why they think what they do,” she said. Her one-act play Wonders, which was produced at OES, gave her a chance to work with characters tiptoeing around a terminal illness. She started writing the play as a comedy based on her own six-day bout with swine flu, but as she worked on it and talked about it with English teacher Art Ward, she realized that she had a more serious theme to explore.
“I ended up channeling a lot of emotions I felt about the death of my friend’s father,” she said. She discussed it first with her friend, who gave her blessing to the project and eventually came to see the play. Over the course of the play, the protagonist’s relationships with others help her come to accept the fact that she is dying. Working out problems through dialogue is a strategy that Alex, not just her characters, often employs.
“I always want to talk out with someone what I’m going to write,” she said. “A lot of my teachers have been willing to sit and listen to me. It’s really helpful having people listen to me who don’t tell me where to go with a story but help me get where I want to go.”
Alex submitted her play to a festival sponsored by Young Playwrights Inc., a theater company founded by the legendary Tony, Grammy and Oscar winning composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and was one of 10 playwrights chosen from among 1600 entrants to attend a playwriting conference in New York City, where she worked on revising Wonders, which was then selected for off-Broadway production.
