After this semester began, an email was sent to the Drama Club listserve to set up a meeting for a new playwright club. People showed up, and now it is a playwright club. This club is organized by seniors Donovan Olsen and Dani Schlenker.  

The club was started was to fill the void left by the lack of an official playwriting class this, and possibly next, semester. “So mostly why we decided to start the playwriting group was because the playwriting class that the theater department offers was canceled this year. Christian Cosmos, who was the professor who taught the class, resigned at the end of last year and the process of hiring a replacement is going to take a while and they didn’t have anyone to teach the class next semester so they canceled it. Dani and I both really love playwriting and we know that it’s something a lot of people enjoy and we wanted a space in which we could talk about playwriting and we could talk about our work and still kinda have that experience and because the class doesn’t exist anymore, we kind of just decided to create it for ourselves. At our first meeting we had about 10 people,” Olsen ‘19 told the Wire.  

The club is supposed to meet bi-monthly, with a different agenda for each of the meetings. Olsen said, “The plan is that we’ll meet twice a month with one meeting every month dedicated to writing exercises and things like that, just playwriting exercises that Dani and I have used in classes we’ve taken and then one meeting a month designated for people to share work they’ve written, hear other people’s voices and get feedback.”

The club is inclusive and welcome to anyone who has an interest in or passion for playwriting. It is a good opportunity to participate in peer reviewing sessions and discussions as opposed to lectures. Olsen said, “Dani and I are facilitating it so last time I led the group that was assembled and a few different exercises I had done in my play class last year and the idea is that we can all discuss as a group and learn from getting feedback from each other rather than one person being an instructor.”Caroline Ashford Arya

“It’s an open group, anyone can come. Like I said we advertise our meetings on drama list serve but we’re looking to send emails on the student digest and yeah we welcome anyone with any level and experience,” Olsen said.

Even though both the organizers of the club are seniors, hopefully this space for budding writers will continue to expand and grow irrespective of the existence of a similar class.