Every youth wants to write their own ticket in life. Ashley Clarke is just taking it to a literal kind of level.
The Grade 12 student at D.P. Todd secondary school hasn't quite graduated yet, yet she can already call herself a playwright. Her teen drama entitled The Groupies was on stage for school performances this week, with a cast of her fellow students turning her words into live action.
It's a drama, sometimes intense, about the life of the modern teenager. There are lighter interactions, some music, and sudden bursts of heavy reality that the characters aren't exactly prepared for, like suicide and impaired driving.
"What I find amazing is watching an actor portray a character I've written exactly as I imagined it when I was writing. That's so strange and exciting," said Clarke. "The first time we all got together to do a table reading, it was like an out of body experience. I didn't know what to do, hearing actual voices speaking for my characters. It was a lot of emotion."
She took on a lot of personal responsibility for this production. First, she had to translate it from story to script. The original prose was in book form and a couple of drama teachers, Linda Riches and Stephanie Chiles, liked it so much Clarke was asked if an adaptation could be made to turn it into a play.
It's a much different writing style, and required a complete re-muscling around the main bones, which remained the same.
"I didn't think it would take as long as it did to re-do it," she said. "There are a lot of scenes in the book that couldn't really happen on a stage, so I had to adjust the story a lot. It's basically the same, but I couldn't just copy and paste."
The engineering also worked in reverse. Translating the prose into script, then having that personified with actors also taught Clarke about ways to improve the original story, so the book is still a work in progress as well.
She credited Chiles with helping her develop the story when it was in book form. Then Chiles and Riches made her the promise of a production, but Riches fell ill and Chiles was put in charge of a different drama class so neither were able to direct the play. So Clarke, the teachers and school administration hatched a unique plan. Clarke, with plenty of supervision, would direct the show herself.
It went well, said Clarke, who has an assertive personality in her favour. There were obstacles within school life that almost caused the project to be scuttled along the way - a total of five teachers have cycled through the production, but the core group of cast and crew persevered.
Having the creator at the helm, and a youth especially, might be especially helpful with authenticating the emotions and themes of a play that looks at tragedy and trauma from a teenager's perspective. One of the central events in the script is a school shooting, played out through the eyes of the teens.
"I got stuck on that part of the story," she said.
It was an unusual position for her, a voracious writer who even carved time out of a family trip to Disneyland to work on the book.
"I've never experienced anything like writer's block, but when I got there in the storyline, I had to put it down for a couple of weeks. I went back and re-wrote it four times."
One time, she was so involved in getting the scene correct that hours of constant revision went by and the computer shut down on her, due to overheating.
She, the cast and crew are now showing the world their efforts. The play runs today for students, staff, family and school supporters.
