Students and faculty from the Youth Onstage! (YO), Community Performance School, along with YO!'s Artistic Director Dan Friedman at the Summer 2008 Graduation Ceremony.

The All Stars Project of New York, Youth Onstage! (ASP of NY, YO!), ASP’s youth theater, wasted no time upon their return to the All Stars Project’s beautifully renovated performing arts and development center on 42nd Street.  For the fifth summer running, the ASP of NY, YO! offered its free Intensive Summer Institute, a demanding five-week session of performance classes for young people taught by a volunteer faculty of professionally-trained theater people.  As always, the young people arrived for classes four days a week from ten o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon.  In addition to disciplines, like Movement, Voice, Improvisation, and Creating a Character, this summer’s class were introduced to the technical “performances” in the theater, as well: each of them stage managed the class for a day, taking responsibility for setting up class and giving direction to their fellow students, which helped develop their capacities as leaders.

Playing to an overflow crowd, the thirteen talented students offered a performance that included original choreography, texts from Shakespeare, and a mini-improv show on Saturday, August 10th.

The other summer project of ASP of NY, YO! has been a groundbreaking Playwriting Workshop, led by ASP of NY, YO! Artistic Director Dan Friedman and by Fred Newman, retired Artistic Director of the Castillo Theatre, YO!’s parent theater.  Six YO! alums met weekly to read many of Newman’s challenging, experimental scripts and to unpack the political and philosophical issues they raise.   The young writers wrote response texts each week and then completed their own one-act plays that challenge, draw inspiration from, and develop the issues from Newman’s – and Castillo’s – body of work. 

For its fall theater season, Youth Onstage! will undertake its biggest production to date: a mini-festival of these plays, produced under the title Young Political Playwrights at Castillo.  A broad team of actors, directors, designers, stage managers, and producers is already being assembled to pull of this ambitious project.  The multiple productions, which will be performed in repertory in November and December, 2008, will allow an unprecedented number of YO! graduates to act as well as produce at our theaters on 42nd Street, side-by-side with the theater professionals and volunteers who have built YO! and Castillo.  This festival, which will provide a major platform for brand new writers to have their work heard, will be a significant event not only for the All Stars Project but for the New York theater community.

For more information about Youth Onstage!, contact Program Manager Brian Mullin at 212-356-8452 or bmulling@allstars.org