It can be difficult to stand out in the swarming theater scene in New York City, with countless aspiring actors and playwrights struggling to make themselves seen and heard.
Jerome Parker used to be one of these hopeful playwrights, but upon his arrival at the graduate playwriting program in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, he made his presence felt.
A first-year graduate playwriting student, Parker recently received the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
“This might be the most respected African American playwriting award in the country. Lorraine Hansberry was the first black American to have a play performed on Broadway,” said Edit Villarreal, associate dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television.
“This award has been created in her name to honor her, and so it’s an extremely prestigious award to win,” said Villarreal, also a playwriting professor.
The Hansberry award was created in 1977 to recognize student-written plays about the black experience.
The winner each year receives $2,500 and an internship at the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center.
The play with which Parker won, “Miracle on Monroe,” shows off Parker’s personal writing style and his fresh perspective of the black experience.
“It’s basically dealing with an inner-city community and how they must pull themselves up by the bootstraps. However, how can you expect them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps when bootstraps are not available?” Parker said.
Parker’s play offers different views of these inner-city communities.
“This is an example of a piece that has poetic language and also very nitty-gritty street language,” Villarreal said. “It’s basically about people, some of whom live on the street as drug addicts and prostitutes, and then the people who are involved with the church who are trying to help the community get out of its poverty. So it’s about the two diametrically opposed groups of people in an economically depressed town.”
For Parker, the most exciting part of winning this award is participating in the tradition of Hansberry and being associated with her.
“To be part of that legacy in any form is just a big honor ““ somewhere that I can see myself carrying a torch. And the Kennedy Center is a huge deal as well, but (the legacy of Hansberry) means more than the Kennedy Center,” Parker said.
Parker was encouraged by his professors to apply for the award during his first quarter at UCLA and was only notified of his win a month ago.
“It came out of the blue, because your job as a playwright is to apply to as many things as you can, so I applied to so many things that I sort of forgot about them after I applied. So he called, and I was like, “˜Oh yeah, I did apply to that,'” Parker said.
The last UCLA student to receive the award was Velina Houston in 1982, and her legacy is also one that Parker can be proud to carry on.
“(Houston) has gone on to be an internationally known playwright, and she currently heads the playwriting program at USC. So Jerome is in very good company at UCLA,” Villarreal said.
Parker is originally from the Bronx and graduated from Williams College with a general theater degree. Before coming to UCLA, he spent about five years in New York.
“New York is so congested with theater, so it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything, especially if it’s not on a large scale with lots of publicity and stuff like that,” Parker said.
UCLA students may find it hard not to become just another face in the crowd, but for Parker, UCLA has become his place to stand out.
“If I had gone to other schools, then I wouldn’t have plays in production, especially in my first year,” Parker said.
“UCLA affords its playwrights the opportunity to see their work on their feet, which is a luxury for playwrights in general. So it’s a good place to be.”