Calvin and Erin are sitting on a bench together.
“I’m having a crisis,” exclaims Calvin. Erin responds: “Aren’t we all?” A beat goes by. And then another one. “Sorry, what’s up?”
It’s witty dialogue and humorous asides like this that pepper Trust Me, I’m Okay, a new play written by a duo of Rockridge Secondary students in possession of some serious dramaturgical – and comedic – chops.
Jasmine Rutigliano and Louise Steinberg, in grades 11 and 12, wrote the play last fall before entering it in the Association of British Columbia Drama Educators’ annual Youthwright Play Festival at the behest of their drama teachers, Jenn Ohlhauser and Avril Foster.
They recently found out their play was one of three selected works from across B.C. that’s made the final cut.
As finalists, Rutigliano and Steinberg have been invited to produce their play at the BC Drama Festival, sponsored by the National Theatre School, in New Westminster in early May.
Rutigliano admits she was “really surprised” at the result, with Steinberg explaining they entered the play without much thought to the end result after her and Rutigliano sat down and, on a lark, begun quickly and energetically composing the scenes that would make up Trust Me, I’m Okay.
The play features 14 characters spanning 22 varied scenes and vignettes which all examine the experience of being young and alive and full of promise while at the same time not always feeling like things are all that promising.
“We felt like it summed up a lot of the characters throughout the play,” Steinberg tells the North Shore News, when explaining the reasoning behind the play’s quotable title, one where adults are often seen at the ready to ask this loaded question with most youth opting to rather hide their head in the sand then talk about it.
“They’re in situations where someone says, ‘Are you OK?’ and they’re like, ‘I’m fine.’”
Are they fine? “Most of the time, no,” says Rutigliano.
There’s the character of Lindsay, a student in a prolonged state of mental breakdown, whose parents aren’t accepting of her sexuality, and who uses dark humour as a coping mechanism; There’s Sidney, the “token straight friend;” and the aforementioned Calvin, who just wants to find a boyfriend before he graduates high school. He has “infamously bad taste in both guys and fashion,” reads a description of the character in Rutigliano and Steinberg’s play text; There’s also Annalouise, the reliable “mom friend” who constantly has snacks and Band-Aids on hand and “cares deeply about equality,” as well as a host of other characters, each alive, each brimming with personality.
“There’s common themes and I would say it’s pretty relevant to today’s culture as well,” says Rutigliano. “I think also the main theme within the play is finding humour in dark parts of life and dark parts of growing up. In our own lives, but also in the characters, I think humour is one of the best coping mechanisms.”
Rutigliano and Steinberg divvied up the workload when writing their play by each individually scribing their own vignettes before coming together to tighten the scenes up through each other’s input.
As the play progresses through scene after scene, an essential truth about being young is revealed: sometimes, when all’s said and done, all you’ve got is each other.
“My favourite scene is right at the end. It’s all the main characters are together for Sidney’s 18th birthday. It sums up all the relationships that they have with each other and how important they are in each other’s lives,” explains Steinberg.
“All of you became like family to me, and all of us, we’re each other’s family,” the character Sidney states, as her friends gather around. And then, blackout. A series of monologues from some key characters follow.
In addition to putting on a production of the show as part of the BC Drama Festival, Rutigliano and Steinberg, who are both veterans of Rockridge’s theatre company, are also putting the show on at their school in late April.
When it comes to the directing side of things, both Rutigliano and Steinberg are relatively new, but are excited to see their words go from the pages of a book to the grand stage.
“It’s a lot of work,” says Steinberg, with Rutigliano adding that she’s finding the “scheduling and financing and everything behind the scenes” aspect of directing a new challenge.
One of their drama teachers, Avril Foster, commended the pair for their “burst of creativity” which led them to write the play in two days, before polishing it up later on.
“Rockridge is really a school that values writing our own plays. It’s something we do on a regular basis for our main stage production. I love what they’ve done,” says Foster.
Asked what it was about their play that so moved the Association of British Columbia Drama Educators to select Trust Me, I’m Okay, Rutigliano and Steinberg concur that it was its relatability .
“No matter who you are when you go through adolescence everyone deals with their own different kind of pain and struggle. Everyone can connect to that,” says Steinberg.
