Hippodrome’s Senior Playwright Festival

Now in its fourth year, the Senior Playwright Festival offers Seniors an opportunity to see their plays come to life on the stage. This yearly competition is open to residents of Florida over the age of 50 and is judged by professionals at the Hippodrome Theatre, University of Florida and Santa Fe Community College.

The winners of the 2008 Senior Playwright Festival are:

• “The Specialist” by Allan J. Marcil of St. Augustine, Florida.

• “Yard Sale” by Jo Starker of Inverness, Florida.

• “A Dinner Party” by San Weintraub of St. Augustine, Florida.

The winning plays will be presented at 7 p.m. at the Hippodrome State Theatre during the Florida Senior Playwright Festival weekend May 9 - 11. All three plays will be presented at each show time. Tickets are free, however reservations are strongly suggested.

Stanley Weintraub
“A Dinner Party”
When Stanley Weintraub, 75, picked up the telephone in March and heard the word “Congratulations,” his first thought was not that he was a winner of the Senior Playwright Festival.

“I thought I was getting the time-share pitch,” Weintraub said with a laugh. But instead of a sales pitch, he received the good news that his play, “A Dinner Party,” was a winner.

Weintraub, a New York native who now lives in St. Augustine, said he has always enjoyed writing, but until recently his experience was mostly in writing manuals and newsletters.

“My background basically was in human resources,” he said. “I always liked to write, but I would write things for employee newsletters. A lot of report writing. One of my first jobs after college was writing for Prentice Hall, and I worked on manuals for businesses.”

Weintraub is part of the Margin Players, a group in St. Augustine formed by Jim Chastain that meets regularly to read plays.

“The play is kind of a byproduct of the group that we belong to,” Weintraub said. “We read plays and meet once a month at individual people’s houses. At one point I decided I was going to write my own play. One play before this.”

Consisting of about 20 people, the Margin Players meet to select a host and a producer. The producer will choose the play and pick a cast. Weintraub said that the first hour is for cocktails, then they read the play and then they have dinner.

“I had written a play for that group,” Weintraub said.

Another member of the group had gotten wind of the Senior playwright project and suggested to Weintraub that he submit his play. Weintraub pointed out it did not fit the criteria.

“We can’t do that,” Weintraub said he told his friend. “He said, ‘It’s OK, just write another one.’”

Weintruab scoffed at the remark, but it was not long before inspiration struck.

“I was out mowing the lawn and this idea came to me, and I came into the house and knocked it out in three hours. And that’s because I’m a slow typist,” Weintraub said.

He admits that version was a rough draft, but after some constructive criticism from his group — and several revisions — it was submitted to the Senior Playwright Festival and chosen as a winner.

“I was surprised. I thought it was good but didn’t know how it stacked up to other people who are probably published writers,” Weintraub said.

The inspiration for his play comes from hosting dinner parties with Toni, his wife of 55 years.
“Write what you know,” Weintraub said. “My wife is a very good cook, and we like to entertain. We like doing dinner parties.”

Weintraub said the host and hostess in his play are loosely based on himself and his wife.

“The dinner party is the wife’s idea,” Weintraub said. “The husband doesn’t like the people being invited. They don’t drink. They are boring. It builds around that.”

Weintraub said he enjoys the creative process and has yet to experience writer’s block. When he is writing, he said, he cannot get away from it.

“Don’t even talk to me,” he said.

Now he is looking forward to his next project.
“I would like to redo the first play I wrote,” he said. “If I can overcome inertia.”

Jo Starker
“Yard Sale”
Senior Playwright Festival winner Jo Starker, 62, recently rejoined the Peace Corps. She had volunteered in the 1960s and now, having retired from a 25-year career in academic advising, she decided she would do it again.

“I started my working life with the Peace Corps, and I really enjoyed my days,” Starker said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Inverness. “I retired and I thought, “I have the time and I can do this again. I love to travel.”

Starker said she was sent to the Ukraine to volunteer, but while there, her knee gave out. She returned home for knee replacement surgery, and while recuperating she wrote her play, “Yard Sale.”

“It kept me occupied,” she said with a laugh.

Like many writers, Starker has been writing for as long as she can remember, but not so much for fame and glory.

“I write just because I like to write, not to really be published,” she said. “It’s just something I do. It’s a hobby. For me, I really enjoy the writing process.”

Published or not, Starker was one of three winners of the Senior Playwright Festival who will get to see her play produced this month at the Hippodrome State Theatre.

Starker said that she enjoys writing historical romance novels and self-discovery novels, works read primarily by her husband.

“I do this for myself,” she said.

But “Yard Sale” is not the first play she has written.

“My first play was in college and it was produced in college,” Starker said. “It was very nerve-racking. Usually when you write something, it’s not shared. But this was a fun experience.”

Her inspiration struck one day while she was playing golf with her husband of 38 years.

“I hit the ball in the water a lot,” Starker said. “He would go down and hunt for the ball. There is an 8-foot alligator down there. And I thought, “What if someone didn’t care if the alligators took him?’”

Thus “Yard Sale” was born, a comedy about the ups and downs of a yard sale held in the sweltering Florida heat.

Starker, who now works at a shelter, was at work when her husband gave her the good news about her winning the contest.

“My husband got the call and called me and passed it on,” Starker said. “He was very excited. He reads all my stuff.”

Starker plans on attending rehearsals and is looking forward to seeing her play produced at the Hippodrome.

“That will be kind of fun,” she said. “My best advice to everybody is: Find something you love to do and go for it!”

Allan Marcil
“The Specialist”
Allan Marcil had spent 25 years in film and TV production when he decided it was time to go back to school and earn his Master of Fine Arts degree. While a graduate student at the University of Southern California, Marcil — a self-described cinemaphile — quit school a mere four credits shy of graduation to pursue a career as a producer. At the time he did not see a reason to stay in school.

“I learned why I needed to stay in school many years later,” Marcil, 55, said in a recent telephone interview. He discovered he would have to practically start over to earn his degree.

“I wanted to get closure,” Marcil said of his decision to return to school. “(My wife and I) moved out of L.A. after 30 years, where we had lived, got married, had kids.”

Marcil said he wanted to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible, so he and his wife moved to Key West but found the area too expensive.

“You need trunkfuls of money, and we didn’t bring that,” Marcil said with a chuckle. So in 2001 they moved to St. Augustine, and Marcil went back to school to finish what he had started decades before. He crammed a two-year program into one and now teaches writing at the University of North Florida.

It was during this time that Marcil signed up for a workshop where he conceived and wrote “The Specialist,” a play that takes place behind the scenes with an Iraqi POW.

“I took the workshop because I’d never written a play, and I might pick up three credits for my master’s degree,” Marcil said. “I didn’t go in with an idea.”

Marcil said he asked himself, “Who is really fighting the war?”

“It’s young people,” Marcil answered. “It is the little person fighting the war on every level. Boots on the ground.”

Marcil has written some screenplays and recently finished a novel, but “The Specialist” is his first play.

“I just finished my first novel. I’m starting to accumulate my first wave of rejections,” Marcil said. “But this is a completely different animal.”

He said part of his motivation came from finding himself once again, 30 years removed, back on a college campus. But he insists this play is not a trip down memory lane.

“It’s the summer of love — all things ‘60s-ish in a contemporary perspective,” Marcil said. “But now the [student] attitudes are so much more non-community — other than rushing for fraternities.”

Marcil said that he submitted his play to the Senior Playwright competition at the urging of his wife.

“She saw the contest announced. I thought there would be lots of good ones, people who really do this stuff and do it more than once,” Marcil said. “And I thought, why not? I re-read it, it’s pretty topical, and it’s not half bad, I had to admit it myself.”

Marcil said it was a Monday when he heard the unexpected news of his winning.

“I was just sitting at my desk and the phone rang and they said, ‘Congratulations!’” Marcil said. “You are always a little suspicious — is this Publisher’s Clearing House? I was shocked and stunned.”

Like the other winning playwrights, Marcil plans on coming to Gainesville to see the production of his play.

“Rumor is there will be a St. Augustine war party coming to Gainesville to cheer me on. Now being an esteemed man of the theater, if I like it, I’ll come back!” Marcil joked.
In the meantime, he stays busy teaching and working on a second play while his novel is being reworked and finished.

For additional information call the Hipp Box Office 352-375-HIPP or online at www.thehipp.org