With uncertainty and anxiety all around us, it’s comforting to think that Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s Young Playwrights Festival perseveres. Now in its 38th season of recognizing original work for the stage created by Chicago high school students, the festival has, for many years, been the first show out of the gate in the new year. (This year’s festival begins previews January 2.) For 2025, the three young playwrights receiving full productions are all young women: Lily Zhang, Carolina Boss, and Lydia Vodopic. 

38th Annual Young Playwrights Festival
1/2-1/26: previews Thu–Sat 1/2-1/4 7 PM; opens Sun 1/5  2:30 PM; regular run Fri 7 PM and Sat 2:30 and 7 PM; Chicago Dramatists, 798 N. Aberdeen, pegasustheatrechicago.org, $30 ($25 seniors, $15 students)

Unlike last year, where the winning entries were by young writers who had moved on to college by the time of the festival, the three writers this year are still in high school. Zhang and Boss both attend Whitney Young, and Vodopic is at Lane Tech. They were chosen out of nearly 300 submissions crafted by students in writing and theater classes with assistance from Pegasus’s teaching artists. The winning entries, selected by a panel of theater professionals, then received revision workshops with other professional theater artists leading up to the full productions.

The company began as Pegasus Players in 1978 (formally incorporating the following year) as a place for fostering work created in City Colleges of Chicago. They also toured shows to underserved communities, particularly in Uptown, and were in residence for many years under the leadership of founding executive director Arlene Crewdson in the O’Rourke Center at Truman College. There they produced many award-winning musicals (resurrecting less familiar work by Stephen Sondheim was a particular strength, and the composer himself became a financial supporter) as well as straight plays, earning 77 Joseph Jefferson Citations (the earlier name for the Non-Equity Jeff Awards) along the way.

But the Young Playwrights Festival has always been a cornerstone of their mission, even after they moved out of their longtime Uptown space, restructured, and renamed themselves Pegasus Theatre Chicago. They’re now under the leadership of producing artistic director ILesa Duncan (who was also artistic director for Lifeline Theatre in Rogers Park, until a fiscal shortfall led to the company returning to an all-volunteer leadership structure). Under her direction, the company persevered with offering digital versions of the festival during the pandemic shutdown, and has expanded support for revision and further development for the winning entries.

The three plays chosen this year differ wildly in settings and stories, but the connective tissue is, well, connection. In Zhang’s Love & Gyros (directed by Reshmi Hazra Rustebakke), a pair of former high school sweethearts meet by chance in Greece many years later, and wonder what might have been—and what could still be. In Vodopic’s Family Fishing Trip (directed by Ruben Carrazana), two nerdy kids unenthusiastically accompany their blue-collar dad onto a rusty boat in Michigan. Boss’s Superheroes Anonymous (directed by Duncan) finds a group of dysfunctional folks with names like “Kark Clent,” “Patrick Poker,” and “Bryce Wax” trying to open up about their feelings in a makeshift support group in the basement of a Pump It Up party emporium.

For Boss, playwriting itself marked a departure from what she usually does. “My go-to is novels. And plays happen so much faster than that. And there’s so much fast-paced action. So I had a really hard time at first with like, trying to figure out the difference between the two because my instinct was to slowly get into it and slowly explain it.” In her play, the conflicts among the self-doubting superheroes develop quickly, with the signature backstories and personality quirks of the icons they’re spoofing coming through clearly. (As if to underscore the exhaustive explorations of Batman’s brooding psyche in pop culture, Wax repeatedly notes how “dark and twisted” the other superheroes’ stories are.)

Zhang, like her Whitney Young classmate, also had focused more on poetry and novels. “The difference between those and playwriting, what you can depict through the stage, is very different. You have to keep that in mind, which was a bit of a struggle for me.” Zhang’s play, like Boss’s, unfolds in real-time (the plays are all around 20-30 minutes) at a Greek restaurant, where James and Cecelia meet by accident and quickly pick up where their romance left off years earlier. But their past regrets and history are the other guests at the outdoor table with them, and their future is far from certain at play’s end. 

Vodopic does have more background in theater than her fellow festival winners. “At my school, we have theater performance club where we perform short plays and skits. So I guess writing it came from ‘What would I want to see during club?’ I thought about what I would want to perform in, or what a performer would think is fun to do. So I think that had a larger influence on it.” Aside from teenage Patrick in Boss’s play, Vodopic’s Family Fishing Trip is the only script to feature adolescent characters. Over the years, I’ve often noted that young playwrights don’t feel always bound to follow the “write what you know” dictum in creating stories tied to teenage drama. 

Vodopic’s play is mostly a comedy, but there are wistful touches of how hard it can be for young people who have little in common with their parents to communicate. She says, “When I was first brainstorming, I was going back and forth between if I wanted to do a dramatic play or a comedy. I landed on comedy just ’cause it’s like the most fun to write. I would say that there’s a couple twists and turns in it and that just kind of came out when I was writing as like, ‘Oh, what if this random weird thing happened?’ But in my class, the instruction was just write a 30-minute play about whatever you want. So I enjoyed not having to follow a structure.” 

Zhang’s play, like the other two pieces, also shows people outside of their usual comfort zones, which forces them to confront parts of their past. She says, “I feel like I’ve always gravitated more towards like romance or like realistic drama. I actually went to Greece and I went to the island that I set my play at. And it was just such a new setting to me and in a way I guess that really stayed with me, until I decided to keep that setting and start from there.”

Boss took a long route to her superhero tale. “Playwriting was very new to me, so at first I was gonna make it this like, deep memoir about my neighbors and how close we all are. And then I was like, ‘There’s not enough time to get eight years’ worth of history in the 30 minutes.’ So I resorted to writing what I knew, which was superheroes, thanks to my dad and my brother. I pretty much found the most ridiculous idea I could—a support group for superheroes.” (The unseen archvillain in Boss’s piece may or may not remind you of an unelected billionaire currently trying to dictate the course of the incoming administration.) Boss adds, “I think all our pieces are all very character-driven and I think that might be the common thread.”

For Duncan, one of the joys of doing the festival is “I get to stay tuned with what young people are thinking—what the students are thinking, what they’re writing about. Sometimes it’s very clear that everybody had a reading assignment and a lot of ’em were based on books. But there’s always a surprise in terms of the approach and I just get excited about helping young people shape their work or just inspire them to continue writing.” Duncan points out that an early alum of the festival, Marvin McAllister (who was in the 1988 festival), has become a distinguished professor of theater and was the first literary manager for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.

Whether the young women participating in this year’s Young Playwrights Festival will stick with theater professionally remains an open question, but they all plan to continue writing. Vodopic notes of her playwriting experience, “It’s like a great combination of writing and theater, which are two things I’m very passionate about. It was so enjoyable to write. I would look forward to writing and editing my play every day.”

Zhang says, “Being a part of this, it really gave me a push of confidence in my own work that I didn’t really have before.” 

For Boss, finding out that she could add playwriting to her existing tool kit as an emerging writer was also a happy discovery. “When I wrote it, it was something that I never expected would go this far. It was such a different experience to hear people read it aloud. Because in the months or so that they were deciding on the plays, I had read it over so many times, I was convinced it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t good. It got repetitive for me. And so the effect was totally lost. But then seeing people act it out and perform it and having them laugh at my own jokes—I felt for the first time, ‘I’ve actually created something that was worth something.ʼ”