When Stephen Sondheim was in high school he wrote a comic musical based on his experience at a private prep school.  The show was a big hit on campus so he took the script to the father of a good friend, who just happened to be Oscar Hammerstein II.  Stephen asked for his honest opinion of the script. Hammerstein said it was the worst thing he had ever seen. “But if you want to know why it’s terrible,” Hammerstein consoled the youngster, “I’ll tell you.” The rest of the day was spent going over the musical, and Sondheim would later say that “in that afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime.”

Not every young playwright grows up to be Stephen Sondheim, but just like Sondheim, many serious high school writers are looking for that sort of intense, critical review from a professional who just might someday become a mentor and partner.  Alex Coddington, a CWA junior and an aspiring playwright, is on just such a quest.

“Dr. Tjardes and Mr. Forier, as well as Blaire Bowden who directed my one act, Perturbed, at last year’s CWA one acts festival, have been extremely helpful in the direction of my writing,” explains Coddington.  “If it were not for them, I wouldn’t be half the writer I am today.  The best thing a writer can ask for is a good mentor and I have been extremely lucky in finding plenty of them right here at CWA.”

This summer, Coddington was one of 13 high school students from around the country accepted into a week-long intensive playwriting program in New York City sponsored by Young Playwrights, Inc.  The Urban Retreat program included daily workshops, roundtable discussions, trips to see shows on and off Broadway, one-on-one writing feedback and rehearsals with professional directors and actors in preparation for an off Broadway staged reading of each participant’s play.  Young Playwrights, Inc. is the only professional theater company in the United States devoted solely to the work of writers aged 18 or younger.  It was founded in 1981 by Stephen Sondheim.

During his week in New York, Coddington and his colleagues saw Mary Stuart and Nine to Five on Broadway and Monstrosity, a show by a group called 13P, off Broadway.   He also saw a reading of 13P’s play A Map of Virtue.  “They were all so different,” says Coddington, “a historical drama about Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scotts, a Dolly Pardon musical and a tragic-comedy about revolutionaries in a fascist boarding school.”

Coddington also worked on an original script during Urban Retreat, a one-act called Constellations.  On a warm summer night 20-year-old Carolyn and her mother, Eve, reconcile ten years after the death of Carolyn’s father as they gaze at the stars.  At the end of week, professional actors brought Constellations to life in a staged reading.

“Before I went (to New York) I was a very raw as a playwright,” says Coddington.  “I wrote because I loved theater and how I wrote spawned from different plays I had read.  Going to workshops and whatnot gave me a better understanding of things like the structure of a play or even things as basic as how to create a character.  I was able to hone my craft in ways that simply reading plays wouldn’t allow me to do.  There’s only so much you can learn about playwriting from re-re-re-reading Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Thanks at least in part to the role Hammerstein played as a teacher and mentor, Sondheim has won an Academy Award, seven Tony Awards, multiple Grammy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.  He’s one of American theater’s most famous artists.  What the future holds for Coddington as a writer is impossible to predict, but thanks to the work of his teachers at Charles Wright and the instructors at the theater company Sondheim created, the opportunities to learn and grow belong to this young writer.  He hopes to continue writing for CWA’s annual one-act festival, in college and perhaps as a professional playwright.  “It’s something I really enjoy doing,” he says, “one of those passions that comes once in a lifetime.”