This summer, Flagstaff Academy’s Elyse Prestopnik and Summit Middle School’s Sarah Zhou will get to see the play they wrote together performed on a one-of-a-kind stage.
Prestopnik and Zhou have been friends since attending preschool at Childrens’ Creative Learning Center. Later the duo solidified their friendship while taking swimming lessons together.
The two students are now in middle school. Although they are in different schools, it did not stop them from writing a play together.
The project began after Prestopnik’s teacher, Terri Reh, introduced her creative writing class to David Saphier. Saphier is a teacher artist, actor and director at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, or DCPA.
Saphier taught a playwright workshop at Flagstaff Academy where he also invited students to enter into the DCPA AT&T Middle School Playwrighting Competition.
The competition invites high school students, and for the first time, middle school students to submit a one-act play. Prestopnik and Zhou were among three middle school winners with their play The New Kids.
The play is about brother and sister, Elmer and Evelyn, who are enrolled at a new middle school. Together they must navigate a new school and learn to make new friends, according to a press release from Flagstaff Academy.
Venturing beyond their own experiences, the girls chose a topic for their play that was completely foreign to them.
We “thought it would be fun to write about something we haven’t experienced. Neither of us has siblings and neither of us has been new,” the girls said via an email.
Their inexperience did not stop them, although they did face a few challenges along the way.
“Our planning was inconsistent which was a challenge. We also got writer’s block a lot,” they said in an email.
Prestopnik and Zhou's inconsistent planning is to be expected after a year of COVID-19 restrictions and because the girls attend different schools.
"It was pretty amazing that they were able to work together in the situation we are in and that is what makes their submission special ... schools and their students tend to compete and in this case they worked together to create a winning submission," Reh said.
The one-act play was not only added to the DCPA anthology but it was selected to be performed at Longmont’s Porchfront Theatre Collective.
Rob Mess rents a house in Old Town Longmont, called the House of Cellista. This house is owned by Rayah Seaburger, otherwise known as Cellista.
Cellista, a cellist, performing artist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, is passionate about the arts and wanted to invest in a home for artists. She subsidizes the home so that artists can focus on their art, according to Mess.
Mess and his wife, Mandy Lehey, applied to live there, knowing the couple would need to produce an estimated six shows a year. Mess is a member of the board for The Longmont Theatre Company and wanted to use the grand front porch of the house as a stage, he said.
“Our front porch is ideally designed to be a stage,” he said.
Having worked with Prestopnik during several Longmont Theatre Company productions, Mess has kept up with her performing arts ventures through Prestopnik’s mother, Julie.
Prestopnik’s mother sent the play to Mess. “When we read it, we were blown away,” Mess said.
Knowing he wanted to produce local plays, Mess immediately asked to produce The New Kids. “This is a perfect piece to put up on our porch,” Mess said.
“It’s hard to believe that middle schooler wrote it. It is very, very well done. It is really advanced for their age,” Mess said adding that structurally the play is sound with character development and progression. “It really covered the basics. It really showed an advanced understanding of playwriting and of their circumstances, of middle school.”
“We were surprised because we didn’t think it was good enough to win. It was kind of just a fun, extra thing to do,” Prestopnik and Zhou said. They are excited and grateful to see their play performed.
The New Kids will be performed on June 25 at the House of Cellista, located at 734 Gay St. Anyone is welcome to watch and no tickets are required. There is a tip jar available and all proceeds collected go to the performing artists that evening, Mess said.
