Wharton Center's Young Playwrights Festival celebrates 30 years of spotlighting new voices

Emilio Rodriguez became a playwright because of a closed door. 

He had gone to an audition in Los Angeles, headshot and resume in hand, only to be told there was no spot for him—that if the casting team had wanted to see him, they’d have emailed. A decision made on how he looked, before he’d said a word. That same night, he watched John Leguizamo, the Colombian-American comedian and actor, perform a one-man show he’d written, and something clicked. “If people are telling you that you don’t look the part, or they don’t see you the way you see yourself, then you write that story,” he says. 

So, he did. Emilio wrote a role for himself and submitted the play to two festivals. When he arrived at the festival in Kalamazoo, he discovered another actor had been cast in the part he’d written. Afterward, the actor pulled Emilio aside—he was a graduating senior who, in four years, had never once played a lead, because someone always decided he didn’t fit.  

“Thank you for writing this role,” he told Emilio. It rearranged everything.  

“The same experience that was the reason I was writing for myself is actually the reason I want to write for other people—to create the roles that let people show what they can do, that others didn’t see in them, or that maybe they didn’t even see in themselves.” 

That belief—that the work itself is worth making, whatever its source—sits at the center of Wharton Center's Young Playwrights Festival, which marked its 30th year in the spring of 2026. Each year, the festival selects six Michigan high school students through an open submission process, pairs them with professional playwright mentors, and stages their one-act 10-minute plays at Wharton Center, performed directed by MSU Department of Theatre students. The plays range widely: some draw on the writer’s own life, others invent a world from scratch. For most of the students, it is the first time they see their words spoken aloud by someone other than themselves. 

Emilio, who now teaches playwriting at the University of Michigan after arriving in the state for a high school teaching job, is one of a small group of mentors who guided students in the festival’s 30th year. Another, Shawntai McCall-Brown, came to the work from poetry and spoken word; she spends her days sending poets into schools through a Detroit-based literary organization. Both describe the mentoring relationship the same way—as something the students steer. 

“I love when the student is the one who tells me what they want to work on,” Shawntai says. She leans on the Liz Lerman method of critical feedback, a structured process that lets the writer name their own questions first. “It allows me to respond to what they’ve named, rather than inserting what I think their play should be.”  

The aim, she says, is to keep a healthy distance between a young writer and their material. “You’re not going directly to the mirror. You’re casting the light, and it’s bouncing off a few things, and hopefully they get to more of their own understanding of self in the world.” 

That distance matters, because the students often reach for difficult material—death, addiction, mental health, the questions teenagers turn over as they begin to suspect the world isn’t built the way they were told. Emilio welcomes it. “It's not my play,” he says. “If it’s something they want to explore and they’re comfortable with it, they absolutely should.”  

He’s just as happy when a student writes about something entirely invented. One of his students that year set a play in purgatory, and Emilio urged her further in. “None of us have been there. We can’t correct you,” he says. “I always love when they can write a play about something no one knows—so there’s no way to fact-check or be right or wrong about it.” 

What surprised both mentors was the students’ fearlessness. Their backgrounds varied—some had written plays or worked in theater as actors or stagehands, others had never seen a play staged or had no theater program at their school at all. However they arrived, they approached the work with the same freedom. 

For his mentees, Emilio says, “there was no intimidation. There was nothing to compare it to, so they were ready to jump right in.” 

Shawntai went into her first call with Stella, then a freshman finalist, unsure how ready the student would be to hear that parts of the play needed opening up—and found Stella already naming the changes herself, walking through how the piece had grown out of a short story, what she wanted to keep, what she was willing to lose. 

“I got off the phone and I remember going to my partner and saying, ‘Stella is so cool,’” Shawntai says. “She was so driven by her own vision—and that’s always the most exciting kid to work with.” 

Kayla Effner was one of those students, back in 2017, when she submitted a play as an assignment for her AP literature class at Williamston High School. She wasn’t expecting much—she didn't know how many students entered, or what becoming a finalist meant—until she made the semifinal round and started to take it seriously. Her play, The Comedy Club, followed a group of middle-aged comedians reckoning with lives that hadn’t amounted to what they’d hoped. It was, she admits, darker than the other finalists’ work that year. “That's just kind of my personality,” she says. 

Seeing it staged was disorienting in the best way. A self-described perfectionist, she’d written pages of precise stage directions, sure she knew exactly how every line should land. “The biggest struggle was having to accept that I couldn’t control it,” she says—that directors and actors would bring their own interpretations. “Even though it was different from what I anticipated, I still loved it. It took on a life of its own.” 

Kayla didn't become a playwright. She studied journalism at MSU, graduated into a market where the jobs she’d trained for were vanishing, and found her way into nonprofit youth work instead. For this interview, she spoke from a hostel in the Philippines—the first leg of a one-way trip through Southeast Asia toward a teaching job in China. What she carried forward from the 2017 festival wasn’t a career so much as a way of seeing. She still considers herself a storyteller; now the stories come from the world she’s moving through. 

That, the mentors contend, is exactly the point. Not every young writer becomes a playwright—and the festival is no less successful for it. “Giving students this access point, they can then become the supporter themselves,” Emilio says. The lawyer, the teacher, the traveler who once saw their words on a stage carry that forward—as an audience member, a supporter, someone who understands what it takes.  

Three decades of alumni bear that out. When Wharton Center surveyed past participants ahead of the YPF 30th anniversary, the responses arrived from people scattered across careers and continents—some still writing, many not, all pointing to the festival as a moment that shaped where they went next.  

Shawntai puts it more simply. Young people rarely get to be taken seriously as artists—to work with professionals, to hear a room full of strangers laugh or fall silent at something they made. “That is hard to come by,” she says. “And that takes a lot of coordination. And we know coordination takes funding.” 

Emilio's path to the stage started with a door closing. Every year, the festival opens one for six Michigan teenagers—and on the other side is a stage, a cast and a room full of strangers waiting to hear what they have to say.