Review of Pegasus Players' 27th Annual Young Playwrights Festival

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called The Chicago Young Playwrights Festival. There are a lot of teenagers who write plays and submit them and then there are three winners. The plays were called Senioritis by Alexus Williams, The Diner by Lauren Trifunovich, and Fears for Fairytales by Clare McKitterick. All of the stories I think were good, and I think that the program is a very good idea, and once I become I teenager I want to do it.

I liked the show Senioritis. It was about a teenaged girl named Maya (Celeste M. Cooper) who was spending more time with her Grandpa (JJ McCormick) when she wanted to spend time with her friends. But then she realized that it was more important to be with her family, which she doesn’t get to see as often as her friends. There was a cranky old man named Black (Carl Herzog) and I thought that his character was really funny. There was a woman named Lori (Joy Valdez-Pappas) and she was very nice to Maya. She and Black were ornery to each other. I thought that the grandpa seemed like a very nice grandpa because of how he treated her. He didn’t say, “You sit down right here or I am going to call your mother!” I would have liked it if the teenager had talked more realistically, but I really liked the old people talking because it was really funny and I think the actors performed it really well.

The Diner was a cool story about a young woman named Betty (Susan Myburgh) who is a waitress at a diner and it was a really rainy night and a man named John (Herzog) came in. It was very suspenseful! You get to know the characters very well and you like all of them…at first! I liked when Ray (McCormick) and Betty were talking about how it was hard to have kids because it showed me that Ray wasn’t exactly a really good guy because he was talking about kids as if they were just a burden. It made you feel like Betty was a better parent. I thought that all the actors did a great job making it exciting. It ends in a mysterious way. I think that it would be better if you knew what was going to happen, but maybe the playwright should just do a sequel.

I loved the play Fears for Fairytales. It was about fairytale characters who needed help from basically a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was Glinda the Good Witch (Myburgh). And there was a sassy Snow White (Cooper) who was afraid of apples; I thought she was cool. And Pinocchio (Daniel Rosenstrauch) is already a boy and he is afraid of lying. I think he did a really good job being like Pinocchio even though he wasn’t a kid. And there was also Captain Hook (McCormick) and he was afraid of any kind of children. And Pinocchio, since he was a kid, Captain Hook was afraid of him. The Big Bad Wolf (Herzog) was afraid of sharp things. I thought that it was really funny how Glinda just came out with an ax and started to swing it at the Big Bad Wolf. I would describe the dialogue as funny and awesome.

People who would like this show are people who like old-fashioned diners, nice grandpas, and ax-wielding, supposedly-good witches. When you go to this show, if you are a kid, it makes you want to do this when you get older. I think that all these shows put together make a very nice evening.


Photos: Andre Walker