By Joanne Degnan, The Packet Group
MILLSTONE — Landing a starring role in her high school play and winning a statewide award for young playwrights — all in the same day no less — has propelled one talented Millstone teenager into the limelight of late.
Peddie School sophomore Jenna Postiglione, 16, recently was named a winner in the New Jersey Young Playwrights Contest for her 10-minute play, “The Prologue to After.” Compounding the excitement was the news she received later the same night of having been selected for the role of Emily Webb in Peddie School’s underclassmen production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
(“Our Town” opens at 8 tonight at Geiger Reeves Theatre of the Peddie School. Tickets are $10 per person.)
”It was so crazy that night,” Jenna says laughing, as she recalls the double bonus. “I couldn’t believe it!”
As one of four high school winners in the statewide playwriting competition, Jenna will be working with professional actors and the literary editors of the theater known as dramaturges to cast her play, which will be presented as a staged reading at the NJ Young Playwrights Festival at Kean University on May 24.
”The Prologue to After” takes place in a train station waiting area where an elderly homeless veteran explores the consequences of his major life decisions after he is visited by visions of himself as a child, a young man and a middle-aged adult.
”I picked this setting, a train station, because it is a place of transition,” Jenna said Saturday. “He’s visited by visions of himself when he was younger, and the decisions he made back then in this same train station, and how different choices might have changed the way his life turned out.”
Jenna wrote the award-wining play last fall as part of a five-week theater workshop offered by McCarter Theatre professionals to Peddie students — a class she almost dropped when she realized the focus was on writing, not acting.
”I said I’m dropping it because I wanted to act,” Jenna recalled. “But my teachers convinced me to just stick it out and try it.”
As time went on, Jenna says she discovered that she actually enjoyed writing plays even more than she did acting in them. When “The Prologue to After,” her very first attempt at playwriting, won an honorable mention from the McCarter Theatre workshop professionals, she was thrilled. But when she also was named a winner in the statewide competition, she says she was shocked.
”I really wrote this play to vent about my own feelings about what I had learned about the Vietnam War,” Jenna said. “I never expected anyone to read it.”
Jenna said the part of her research she found particularly disturbing was that soldiers who fought in that unpopular war were often ostracized and faced both homelessness and joblessness when they returned home.
”I was really angry about that and I wanted to write someone’s back story,” Jenna said, referring to the nameless, disabled Vietnam veteran in her play who is panhandling in the train station, the same place where years earlier he had made the fateful decisions that became the turning points in his wrecked life.
The fact that “The Prologue to After” has apparently resonated with the judges in the statewide contest is something that she says she never anticipated.
”I was surprised by how this all turned out because I never really expected than anyone else (outside of class) would be reading this.”
One person who wasn’t surprised about how well the play has been received is Elizabeth Sherman, Peddie’s director of theater.
”Jenna is thoughtful, hard working and deeply passionate about the theater,” Ms. Sherman said. “She wrote a very unique moving play about one man’s journey from the beginning to the end of his life.
”This was a very ambitious undertaking for a 10-minute play and Jenna worked tirelessly with her dramaturgy, revising her text until she felt it was complete,” Ms. Sherman said.
Right now, Jenna the actress is busy with rehearsals for “Our Town,” which opens at Peddie on May 13, but says she hopes to get back to playwriting once she has some “down time” in the months ahead.
When asked which she is more passionate about, writing or acting, she doesn’t hesitate.
”If you would have asked me that at the beginning of the school year I would have definitely said acting,” Jenna said. “Now it’s playwriting. I enjoy it and it’s something that I can really see myself doing in college.”
This was the 28th year for the New Jersey Young Playwrights Contest, which is designed to enrich the writing experience for students in grades 4 through 12 by giving them feedback about their plays from real theater professionals. More than 400 plays were read in a series of rounds for each age division, but only 10 were honored as statewide winners this year: four in grades 10-12, and three winners each in the elementary and junior high school divisions.
The New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival is a partnership between Playwrights Theater and Premier Stages at Kean University.

