Rose festival celebrates local youth playwrights
From the Omaha World-Herald, April 28, 2016
An entry in the Rose Theater’s annual playwriting contest for youths won second place in the national Young Playwrights for Change competition.
“Tears of Tomorrow,” by Rachel Radloff, will be one of the plays presented in this week’s Young Playwrights Festival at the Rose. Theater staff submitted it to the national contest after it won first place in a playwriting contest associated with the festival.
The contest sponsor is Theater for Young Audiences/USA, an advocacy group for children’s theaters across the country.
Rachel’s play is about a young girl, Mae, surviving with her family after global warming devastates Earth. It is the first script from the Rose to become a finalist in the national contest.
The 13-year-old daughter of Eric and Kori Radloff, Rachel is a seventh-grader at Russell Middle School. Her mother is the marketing and public relations director at the Rose.
Kevin Ehrhart will direct Radloff’s play at the Rose, with a cast that includes Daisy Friedman and Abby Schreiber, both of Westside Middle School, Chloe Fowler of Omaha Westside High School and Taijah Carlisle of Omaha Central High School.
Four other plays and two staged readings are on the program for the festival, to be held today, Saturday and Sunday.
Ehrhart and another Rose professional, Nik Whitcomb, have been working with the festival’s participants, students from schools across the Omaha area. Topics of their plays include the importance of recycling and a quest to become the new Shakespeare.
“Teen writers have such unique points of view on the world, and these works help celebrate them and improve their skills as a writer,” Ehrhart said in a press release.