The Playhouse has just closed its Summer Theatre Festival, which welcomed in thousands of patrons over the past seven weeks to their stage for new productions every weekend, spanning musicals to comedies, live music to cabaret.
Coming up Saturday, Sept. 13, the Playhouse's focus will shift from one of arts entertainment to arts education on one very busy day, starting in the form of a playwriting workshop for adults in the morning, but by afternoon, transitioning into auditions for a newly written original play, created by local teenage White Lake Youth Theatre Council students, Evangelyn Boltz and Hannah Hellewell, “Don’t Say the M(acbeth) Word.” This youth murder mystery will be produced at The Playhouse Nov. 14-15, and auditions are open to students ages 8-18 who wish to be involved.
Beginning the day with White Lake Dramatic Club learning from Chicago’s Aaron Johnson, the Playwriting Workshop will run from 9 a.m. to noon, and is limited to 12 students of all manner of backgrounds, from brand new writers to those with experience and published authors.
The price for the three-hour workshop is $25, and registration is available at the Playhouse website. Participants should plan to bring their favorite writing medium, whether notebook and pen or laptop or tablet, and all students are encouraged and welcome to share their work at the end of the workshop.
The instructor for this course, Aaron Johnson, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he majored in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Theatre and Drama. From there, he went on to get his Master's of Fine Arrts in Playwriting from Ohio University. He then moved to Michigan, where he worked with the Detroit Playwrights' Lab at the Detroit Repertory Theatre, writing and producing multiple plays while also leading group discussions and writing exercises.
The new White Lake Youth Theatre year unfolds at 12 p.m. Sept. 13, with auditions for the youngest Circus Arts students (ages 8-12) and older, main title roles (ages 12-18) from 2:30-4:30 p.m. that Saturday and again Sunday, Sept. 14, with auditions for the White Lake Youth Theatre Council’s Autumn Performance Workshop of Don't Say the M(acbeth) Word: a Teen-Led Quest to Bring Shakespeare into the Modern Era. This will be the second year these teenage writers have produced new work for local students to embody and perform at The Playhouse at White Lake, and this project is supported by grants from The Youth Advisory Council of the Community Foundation for Muskegon County and the Bookstock Fund.
