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When La Maya Mapp received writing a monologue as an English assignment, she never expected it would culminate in a live performance on the Adrienne Theater Mainstage, 2030 Sansom St.
“Getting a good grade was the original motive,” the resident of the 2000 block of South 21st Street said. “I was just doing it to get an A.”
Mapp, along with 15 other students from high schools throughout the region, is scheduled to have her monologue performed in the 2010 Young Voices High School Monologue Festival, a collaborative endeavor between Philadelphia Young Playwrights and the InterAct Theatre Company.
Students drew their inspiration from InterAct’s world premiere of “City of Numbers: mixtape of a city …” by playwright Sean Christopher Lewis, according to a press release. As a story told through a series of monologues, “City of Numbers” examines both Philadelphia’s sense of division and community. The festival was to run Feb. 3 to 6, but the Saturday show was canceled, with no rescheduled date, due to last weekend’s snowstorm. Mapp, who had the chance to attend the Thursday performance, said her family planned on seeing the Saturday show and was disappointed they were not able to.
Already an avid writer, Mapp’s favorite genre is poetry and the 10th-grader wanted to create a piece that was “outside the box and different.”
“I wanted to write about something that challenged me,” the Science Leadership Academy, 55 N. 22nd St., student said. Mapp said she had about two weeks to work on the project last October.
After admitting to some procrastination tendencies, Mapp, 16, said it took her about a week to complete her entry, “Its Importance.”
“The hardest part was trying to end it,” she said of the writing process.
The monologue, submitted by English teacher Larissa Pahomov along with other students in Mapp’s class, tells the story of a young man and his friend who deal drugs to make enough money to go to the same college, where they plan to share a dorm room and, as the monologue reads, “major in something that can get our family out of here …”
Mapp said the message of her work is, “You can get anywhere you want, just do it the right way. If you try your hardest the right way, you’ll get where you want to be.”
For Mapp, the few days of rehearsing and reviewing the works were filled with uncertainty.
“When I first got there, I thought, ‘everyone’s is going to be better than mine. Everyone else was saying how hard they worked and how long it took them,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘I’m here, so I’ll see what happens.’”
Although the professionals were instrumental in the page-to-stage process, Mapp said she essentially had carte blanche on the final product’s outcome. Any apprehension the young writer might have had dissipated once she became more comfortable with the atmosphere.
“I was 100 percent in charge,” she said. “They tell us what needs improvement, but we can disagree if we want … if we didn’t want to change something, they understood why. I was the boss the whole time.”
A six-member literary committee of theater educators and producers decided which monologues would be featured in the festival, taking two-and-a-half weeks to whittle down the record-breaking 411 submissions to 16.
“Those [committee] members were reading a lot of monologues for a while,” Young Playwrights’ Executive Producing Director Glenn Knapp said.
The only criteria was the writer had to be in high school and present original work, Knapp said, leaving plenty of room for imagination regarding subject matter.
“In any selection process, when one is trying to select works to put onstage, there are a lot of [key elements],” Knapp said, including strength of voice, dramatic arc and telling a complete story.
Even if a student’s work at the time was not as polished as it could be, Knapp said it could still have great potential.
“Those of us who read plays might detect promise in a writer, and recognize a voice that’s strong even if the monologue isn’t quite there,” he said.
The judges knew little about the students before reading their work, Young Playwrights Program and Outreach Associate Nirvana Rivera, who served on the selection committee, said.
“It’s blind beyond what they write on their submission sheets, like school, address, theme,” Rivera said, adding she saw a unique display of leadership this year and the community the students collectively synthesized was “really special.”
InterAct company member Johnny Walker also noticed distinctive traits in the writers’ voices. Walker, 26, was cast to perform La Maya’s monologue, his second showcase with the theater company.
“I thought it was full of life,” he said of Mapp’s work. “It captured such a beautiful energy.”
According to the actor, it was difficult for he and his writer to set up times to discuss the project.
“Our schedules never worked out exactly right,” he said, “but there was one meeting early on with La Maya where we got a lot of good feedback.”
Mapp isn’t sure if she wants to continue creating for the stage, but she does have advice for fellow young writers that can be applied to any aspect of life:
“Just try your best,” she said. “Be creative and think outside the box. If you go out of your comfort zone, usually that will take you places.”
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