IU graduate student wins national playwrighting award

A tinge of the bizarre can come highly recommended.\nFor Jonathan Yukich, who recently won $2,500, a workshop in Portland, Ore., a trip to Washington, D.C. and a national playwrighting award, good entertainment and engaging writing are anything but reality-based.\n"I feel that people don't go to the theater to see real life; they go to the theater to escape real life," Yukich said. "My influences come from carnivalesque. (I'm) trying to entertain my generation and get them to come to the theater."\nAs an MFA student in IU's highly select graduate playwrighting program, Yukich is one of only three graduate student playwrights at IU, all of whom study with professor Dennis Reardon. A teacher, department director and the main influence in the selection process that brings another talented playwrighting student to IU each fall, Reardon constitutes IU's entire playwrighting department.\n"A trade journal called it the most elite playwrighting program in America," Reardon said. \nHe attributes the exclusive nature of the department to its commitment to producing one thesis play for every graduate playwright that it accepts. Since it would be impossible to schedule more than one student-written play a year in the IU theater season, space in the playwrighting program is limited. \n"I recruit very carefully," said Reardon, who spent the last four and a half months in a painstaking search for his next pupil. "I brought Jonathan to this University to expand the stylistic scope of what we produce." \nAnd Yukich has lived up to his teacher's expectations. \n"He's won every major playwrighting award at the collegiate level," Reardon said. "This is a major national talent."\nYukich was living in New York when he decided to apply to IU as an MFA candidate. For Yukich, finding a teacher who would support the development of his unique style meant the difference between continuing to improve and treading water. \n"I was really pleased with Indiana because I like my professor," Yukich said. "It seemed like the only program that would allow me to keep going forward and get an MFA rather than taking a few steps backwards."\nThe latest step forward for Yukich has been the success of his play "Edible Shoes." Although he describes the work as a comedy, he added that a very dark undercurrent exists in the play.\n"(It's) a satire on corporate America and … the laziness and blindness of our system," he said.\nAfter winning the 2002 Wichita State University (Kansas) National Playwriting Contest, Yukich's play received its national premiere there in November 2002.\nDr. Bela Kiralyfalvi, director of the Wichita State University Theater and a judge on its playwrighting contest selection committee said Yukich's play stood out because of its hilarity and exuberance. \n"It's a very theatrical satire about modern American life … (that) has certain poetic qualities," Kiralyfalvi said. \nThe success of the play at Wichita State led members of their selection committee to submit the play for consideration in the Kennedy Center's annual Michael Kanin playwrighting awards. This year the Kennedy Center added a new one: the Paula Vogel playwrighting award, which honors student-written plays that focus on diversity, tolerance and issues of disempowerment in our society. "Edible Shoes" was a perfect candidate for this focus, pitting characters from the realm of corporate America such as "The Man That Smacks" and "Dancing Cockroach" against a circus owner named "Cherry" and his performance troupe. Yukich became the first playwright to win the award.\n"There was an audacious quality to the play," said Gregg Henry, artistic director of the Kennedy Center's American College Theater Festival. "He's written a very funny play on very serious themes."\nOne of the main prizes Yukich will receive as a result of his winning entry is a chance to take part in a two-week workshop at the Portland Stage Center in Oregon. \n"It's a development workshop for new plays," Henry said. \nIn Portland, Yukich will have a chance to meet four other promising playwrights and see a staged reading of "Edible Shoes."\nAlthough Yukich has his own underlying meanings in mind when he writes, he does not want his plays to dictate a particular truth to audiences when they are performed. Rather than spell out the plays' purposes, Yukich aims to entertain and engage his audience in the creative process. \n"I'm not really an agenda playwright," Yukich said. "The more you try to explain life, the more it's coming from one person." \nEmphasis on entertainment and theatrics is what sets Yukich apart from the crowd, his teachers say. \n"I think students will be very attuned to what Jonathan writes," said Reardon. "You just sit in the audience with your mouth agape and wonder what's going to happen."\nYukich's upcoming projects include his thesis production, "The Alien from Cincinnati," which will be part of the '03-'04 IU theater season.