Young playwright takes a big leap
Miguel Fernandez's ‘wacky' play about a trampoline park
employee wins a spot in Center Stage festival May 2
Last year, Miguel Fernandez, a Centennial High School student and budding actor, was talking with a friend when he thought of an unusual idea for a play.
“I said it would be funny if, for next year's playwriting assignment — because we do this every year in theater class — if I made the actors jump on stage for a long period of time, as if they were on trampolines, when there's no trampolines,” said the junior, who has been acting since the sixth grade. “They'd just be jumping onstage. I think that would just be hilarious.”
Much to his surprise, the play that Fernandez wrote on this premise was one of five selected out of 600 entries from students across the state to be performed by Center Stage during the Baltimore-based professional theater company's annual Young Playwrights Festival on May 2.
Contrary to its creator's starting premise, “Enlightenment in Skyzone” is not simply about bouncing — though its character does experience up and downs.
The play is about an employee at a trampoline park who has doubts about “his future, his drive and social Darwinism,” according to a summary from Center Stage. “But his doubts are assuaged when the best capitalist in all of American history makes an appearance.”
Fernandez affectionately calls his play “wacky” and said he worked with the director to maintain the wackiness .
“The director said, ‘So do you want actual trampolines? Because we can get actual small trampolines,'?” Fernandez recalled. “And I was like, ‘No. It needs to be on flat ground.' I was pretty lenient on what the director was telling me about what he wants. But when it came to that, I needed that, that original dream.”
In writing the play, Fernandez said that he created a situation he thought would be fun to act in. He added enough stage directions to support the actors, he said, but not so many that he would be taking away their creative freedom.
“I think every actor can put their own special spice to it,” he said, “so I don't want to limit it.”
Fernandez thinks this freedom is so important, he said, because the differences between productions are “really what make them unique.”
The Ellicott City resident witnessed this firsthand while attending Chesapeake Theater Company's summer camp at the Patapsco Female Institute.
“I saw their productions over the summer — “Cleopatra,” “As You Like It” — I saw these productions at least 20 times,” he said, “and every time I would either find something out that I didn't realize last time, or they would do something different that was hilarious.”
Fernandez was first inspired to try his hand at acting by his older brother.
“His friend convinced him to do a show his eighth-grade year,” Fernandez said of his brother. “So he did it, and he was all like, ‘Dang, I wish I knew about this earlier,' because he had a lot of fun with it.'
“So when I was in sixth grade,” Fernandez said, “I thought, ‘Why not? I'll try it out; he seemed to have a fun time with it.' And then I ended up taking a real liking to it, and I've been doing it ever since.”
Fernandez, who plans to study acting and screenwriting at Northwestern University after he graduates from Centennial, said he likes telling a story to a live audience.
“Being an actor on stage when the audience laughs or claps, you feel them get stiller when there's a really frightening moment or something — that really gives you energy,” he said.
He enjoys being a part of a live audience, too.
“This is the first time I'm seeing it, but it's definitely not the first time the actors are doing it,” he said. “But while watching it, I still feel like I'm with them along the journey.”
The young playwright will be at the May 2 festival to see his play performed.
“I'm excited to see what they'll do with it, and I'm excited to see people jumping on stage,” Fernandez said.
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