Peddie Student Wins Top Honors in Playwright Contest

What began as a project for a class she considered dropping has turned into an award-winning experience for sophomore Jenna Postiglione.

Postiglinone, 16, of Millstone, was chosen as a statewide winner in the New Jersey Young Playwrights Contest this spring. As a winner in the competition, she worked with professional dramaturgs and actors to cast her 10-minute play, which was performed at the New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival at Kean University on May 24. She received recognition May 5 at a Governor's Awards for Arts Education ceremony at the New Jersey State Museum.

Postiglione, who had the leading role of Emily Webb in Peddie's performance of “Our Town,” wrote her play in a theater workshop she took at Peddie last fall. During the five-week class, she learned from professionals from Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center for the Performing Arts, but almost quit when she discovered that the class focused on writing instead of acting. She stuck with it, however, and “wound up loving it,” she said.

As for the premise of the play, entitled “The Prologue to After,” Postiglione was inspired by her seventh-grade teacher, who spoke often of the Vietnam War. He told Postiglione and her classmates that many vets were ostracized in the U.S. after the war and ended up homeless with no jobs, she said. “It was horrible,” she commented.

Her play, which takes place in a dark, dusty and littered train station, focuses on a disabled homeless vet who is visited by younger versions of himself: A young boy who plays baseball and has a life filled with promise; an eager rookie who is engaged and is about to play baseball professionally; a resolved young man about to head off to war; and a disabled vet returning home from the war who is anxious about his future, but has confidence that the country he fought for will provide.

She chose the train station as the play’s setting because it symbolizes transition and because it’s where many important events in her character’s life took place, Postiglione said.

This award is the third writing honor Postiglione has received – she won the Essay of the Year Award from the Asbury Park Press’ Student Voices Essay Contest while at Millstone Middle School and had a short piece of writing published in a collection of children’s writing when she was 6.

Postiglione plans to work on her writing and playwriting over the summer, she said.

“Jenna is thoughtful, hard working and deeply passionate about the theater,” said Elizabeth Sherman, Peddie’s director of theater. “She wrote a very unique and moving play about one man's journey from the beginning to the end of his life. This was certainly an ambitious undertaking for a 10-minute play, and Jenna worked tirelessly with her dramaturg, revising her text until she felt it was complete.”