By Kaitlyn Kanzler, Special Writer
CRANBURY — Cranbury School sixth grader Jason Li got to see his hard work come to life not once, but twice.
On June 15, several eighth grade students, directed by English teacher Elizabeth Grimaldi, presented ‘The Time Traveler,’ a play written by Jason to the fifth grade class.
”We were excited to do one last project before the end of the year,” Allison Spann, who played Oswald Simpson, the main character.
According to Mrs. Grimaldi, she recruited Allison to help make the performance a reality.
”The first rehearsal we had a couple of stumble throughs but other than that, I think we pulled it off and everybody did a great job,” Allison said.
The student actors has only three weeks to memorize lines, find costumes, and rehearse along with preparing for graduation and other responsibilities.
”We wanted to stay as true to Jason’s script as possible because that’s what we were celebrating,” Allison said.
Jason entered his play in The NJ Young Playwright’s Society, a statewide contest where he was one of the winners in the elementary school division.
After several rounds, a “team of readers selected plays from each division to be honored as statewide winners,” according to the Playwright’s Theater’s website.
The chosen plays, including Jason’s, were performed by professional actors during the New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival at Kean University.
”It was really cool and really unique because [the actors] really got into character and they spoke it with the right emotions,” Jason said about the performance at Kean University.
According to Mrs. Grimaldi, the actors at the Festival performance stood in a line and read the script, unlike the performance at Cranbury School.
”Jason said to me that [the student actors] brought it to life for him because we had the scenery and the costumes and the movement,” Mrs. Grimaldi said.
According to Rebecca Leonard, secretary to the Chief School Administrator/Principal, more than 180 students in middle schools submitted plays for review by a panel of judges comprised of college professors, directors, actors and other adult playwrights.
”It must have been a lot of patience and time and effort he put into this,” Maya Sarafin, another student actor, said. “He had to do all the research for each character beforehand and he had to really think about their backgrounds and what they went through in order to achieve the things they did.”
Jason’s play is about a boy named Oswald Simpson, who is “addicted” to video games and doesn’t live up to his potential.
He is visited by an alien-like creature named L-2 who takes him through the ‘Z-Portal,’ a time-travelling device where he visits by three important people. Each one has struggled to overcome something in order to accomplish great things and they help Oswald realize his true potential.
”It’s a little like ‘A Christmas Carol,’” Mrs. Grimaldi said. “The people he visits are like the ghosts that visit Scrooge.”
According to Jason, he was overjoyed that he had won the competition and was surprised with the outcome.
”I just came up with it. There was no real thinking process,” Jason said. “It just popped into my mind and then I worked on it until it became a finished product.”
According to Jason, this was the first time he had ever written a play and he didn’t expect to win the competition.
Jason is currently a member of the Creative Writing Club and enjoys writing in his free time.
All of the students involved agreed that Jason was going to be very successful in whatever he chose to do in life.
According to the Playwright Theater’s website, the “New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival has been deepening the writing experience for young writers by providing detailed feedback from theatre professionals about students’ plays.”
For information about the Festival, please contact Jim DeVivo, Director of Education at Playwrights Theatre, (973) 514-1787, ext. 14 or [email protected]

