Today at the DCPA NewsCenter, we continue our daily countdown of the 10 Colorado student playwrights who have been named semifinalists for our fourth annual statewide playwriting competition. On Tuesday, Jan. 17, we will announce the writers whose plays will be read at the 2017 Colorado New Play Summit. (Details below.)

SCENESTER NO. 10: SAMANTHA SHAPARD

• School: Overland High School, Aurora
• Class: Senior
• Teacher: Eric Eidson
• Your play title: The Sincerest Form of Flattery
  
• What is your play about? My play is about a girl named Addison who is essentially a copycat. She craves attention and material possessions, and she’s started stealing people’s entire personalities. She lives as a form of self-gratification. The story follows her interactions with another girl, Tanya, who is a skateboarder.
• What was your inspiration for writing your play? Addison is actually a character of mine I’ve written about in many previous stories. I was doing a playwriting independent study with my theater teacher, Mr. Eidson, and thought she would be a really cool character to write a play about. I love villains, and Addison is as bad as it gets.
• Favorite word that appears in your script: “Ollie.” Tanya is a skateboarder, so I had to look up some skateboarding lingo! It’s basically a trick where the rider leaps into the air with a board without the use of the rider’s hands.
• Killer casting: I think I would have to cast Willow Shields (The Hunger Games) as Addison. She has big eyes that make her look really innocent, and I also feel like she could play a shifty character really well!
• What did you learn from writing this play? I learned more about how to revise my work many times to make it the best it can be. I worked on my play with my theater teacher and some friends from school, and I edited it several times before it was finished.

Meet Samantha Shapard’s semifinalist twin sister, Sarah

Our countdown of the 2017 ‘Scenesters’ (to date):
No. 1: Sarah Shapard, Overland High School
No. 2: Ryan Patrick McCormick, Fort Collins High School

No. 3: Jasmin A. Hernandez Lozano, Vista Peak High School
No. 4: Abby Meyer and Nic Rhodes, Fossil Ridge High School
No. 5: Amelia Middlebrooks, Valor Christian High School
No. 6: Corinna Donovan and Walker Carroll, Crested Butte Community School
No. 7: Jessica Wood, Denver Christian School
No. 8: Parker Bennett, Fossil Ridge High School
No. 9: Daniela Villalobo, York International

About the 2017 Regional High-School Playwriting Workshop and Competition:

What: A one-act playwriting competition designed for area high schools. Local playwrights and DCPA Education faculty taught 138 playwriting workshops in 46 Colorado high schools. More than 2,823 high-school students participated in those workshops, which were held in every school district in the Denver-metro area and in 15 counties around the state, including Gunnison, Garfield, El Paso, Chaffee and Ouray.

Why: To nurture Colorado’s young playwrights; develop theatre artists and audiences; develop new plays; and advance literacy, creativity, writing and communication through playwriting.

How: A total of 132 submissions were judged blindly by DCPA artistic, literary and education professionals. Ten semifinalists are being identified through this rolling daily countdown. At the end of the countdown, three winners will be named. They will receive a cash scholarship of $250 each AND a staged reading in the 2016 Colorado New Play Summit next month. In addition, each teacher of the three finalists will receive a $250 gift certificate for books, supplies or other teaching tools for their classrooms. One play also will be presented as a fully staged performance exercise for DCPA Education students in the summer of 2017.

Sponsors: Robert and Judi Newman/Newman Family Foundation with matching gifts from The Ross Foundation, June Travis and Transamerica.

Video: We talked with the three 2016 student playwriting finalists and looked in as their plays were read by professional actors at the 2016 Colorado New Play Summit in February. Video by John Moore and David Lenk for the DCPA NewsCenter.