Two Original Works by ISD Students Featured in The Coterie Theatre’s Young Playwrights’ Festival

Two ISD students, Van Horn High School’s Mallory Kneece and Truman High School’s Antonyo Byrd II, had their original works selected for performance in The Coterie Theatre’s Young Playwrights’ Festival Sunday, May 1 at 7 p.m. on The Coterie stage inside Crown Center (2450 Grand Ave.). Kneece’s effort, A Day for Demons, and Byrd’s work, Who to Trust, were among just a handful chosen for presentation.

Both were invited to become members of The Coterie’s Young Playwrights’ Roundtable after participating in The Coterie’s Reaching the Write Minds playwriting workshop at the high school. Kneece has been on the Roundtable since April 2015, Byrd since January.  “Members of the Roundtable work to create their own plays or monologues through the course of the year,” said Jeff Church, The Coterie’s artistic director. “During those workshop sessions, members listened, critiqued and provided feedback to each other in order to develop their work.”

Kneece’s work, A Day for Demons, is about the choices people make every morning and the consequences of those choices. “The most exciting part is, I get to see something I wrote publicly recognized as good work,” she said. The idea for Byrd’s piece, Who to Trust, came to him when he was “in a gas station with a bunch of creepy people in there,” thinking about what could happen to travelers. He has been doing rewrites and working with a professional director to hone his work. “Antonyo’s doing a great job with it,” Church said. “He’s also acting in one of the other selected plays.”

Tickets for the festival are $5 and available at The Coterie box office. For more information or to make reservations, call (816) 474-6552 or go to their website- www.thecoterie.org.