Sondheim founded a program for young playwrights

Person: Stephen Sondheim
Lived: 1930–2021
Field: Musical Theater
From: American

The story

Sondheim had himself been taught as a teenager by Oscar Hammerstein II, who went through his early attempts at musicals and explained how to make them work. He never forgot what that guidance meant, and he wanted other young writers to have a way into the theatre.

In 1981 he founded Young Playwrights Inc., an organisation dedicated to introducing young people to writing for the stage. He served as its executive vice-president, and his name and backing drew attention and support. At its heart were a national playwriting competition for young writers and an annual Young Playwrights Festival in New York, where selected plays by writers aged 18 or younger were given professional readings and productions.

For many winners the festival was a first taste of professional theatre. Jonathan Marc Sherman submitted plays to the competition for several years before his one-act Serendipity and Serenity received a staged reading at Playwrights Horizons in 1987, followed by a full production of his play Women and Wallace in 1988. Carter Bays, later co-creator of the television comedy How I Met Your Mother, saw his high school play produced at Playwrights Horizons as a festival finalist in 1993. Lucy Alibar won the competition at 14 and went on to co-write the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, and the filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan and the playwright Rebecca Gilman are among other past winners.

When Sondheim's 80th birthday was celebrated in 2010, one of the concerts held in his honour at New York City Center was a benefit for Young Playwrights, featuring stars from his shows including Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Nathan Lane.

The organisation was one of several ways Sondheim invested in the next generation, alongside his personal mentoring of composers and his teaching of master classes. He believed that craft could be taught, and that young writers learned best by having their work taken seriously by someone who had mastered it.

Why it matters

Young Playwrights gave students a structured path into writing for the stage, helping new voices, some of them now well known, find their way into theatre, film and television.