Smith's play, The Sacrifices, was selected from more than 1,400 submissions for the Public Theater's Summer Play Festival (SPF).
This summer,“SPF” took on a whole new meaning for playwright Alena Smith '02.
Smith's play, The Sacrifices, was selected for the prestigious Summer Play Festival (SPF) sponsored by New York City's famed Public Theater. One of eight plays chosen from more than 1,400 submissions from the U.S., U.K. and Australia, The Sacrifices ran July 14-19, and audience response, according to Smith, was overwhelmingly positive:“We had sold-out houses for every show, and received one standing ovation!”
This isn't Smith's first play to be produced in New York; in 2007, The Lacy Project was performed at the city's Ohio Theater Ice Festival, and that same year A Day Such as Today at the Pavilion appeared at Riverside Park. But Smith considers the Public Theater a second home; she's part of the theater's two-year-old Emerging Writers Group, designed for playwrights in the earliest stages of their careers.“It has been incredibly gratifying to see my play performed at the Public Theater with a group of brilliant actors and a wonderful director,” says Smith.
The Sacrifices focuses on a family cruise gone awry, when son Justin, a recent art school graduate, learns that his parents will not be financing his efforts to establish himself as a rising star in New York's art world.“He falls apart, and the whole family falls apart, in a way that's hopefully comedic as well as dark,” says Smith.“The play examines the conditions of being a young artist in New York, as well as issues of privilege and class. And you have this nuclear family that's reached the end of its time together, and all of its members are accepting this fact and moving on to new phases of their lives.”
While a senior at Haverford, Smith wrote her first play, which was performed in Lunt Basement. Called Alice Eat Your Words, it was strongly influenced by her philosophy major.“I was into Wittgenstein and his philosophy of language,” she says,“and the play was an ‘Alice in Wonderland' riff on language and nonsense.” She directed it herself, and convinced friends involved in Bryn Mawr's theater program to star.“I'm not an actor,” she claims—although, she admits, she did take the stage during her sophomore year in a play written by Bill Dawe '00.
She went on to earn her M.F.A. in playwriting from Yale School of Drama, and later saw her work showcased at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Northwestern University, and the A.R.T. Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Smith has also been awarded the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting from Yale and a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artists' Fellowship.
Smith, who lives in Brooklyn and works during the day as a nanny and a tutor, is now crafting a new play with the help of the Emerging Writers Group; the members meet weekly to review new pages of a participant's play, and stage a reading series at the end of the year. Plucker (all Smith will say about the title is that it refers to a parrot) centers around young couples in New York City who are grappling with the anxiety of moving in together.
Originally a poet (“although most of my poems were more like monologues”), Smith loves playwriting because, she says, she finds it exciting to create a structure for a real-life event.“You build it with words and it becomes physical and real,” she says.“There's a human, living element to theater that's addictive; I can't imagine giving it up.”
