Alyssa Sileo
Alyssa Sileo is a playwright, dramaturg, applied theatre artist, and arts access advocate, based in South Jersey. She will graduate from Drew University with her honors theatre arts degree in May 2022. Her work explores sapphic identity, middle school dreams, and accompliceship to liberation. She’s a student of the transformative justice movement, the tarot, and astrology. (BTW--she’s a Capricorn sun, Virgo Rising, Leo Moon.) In April 2021, she was honored to collaborate with Ensemble Studio Theatre Artists and virtually present her play Digital Sapphism. These days she’s developing Spotlight on Fire, soon reaching her ten year anniversary of the first draft.
Website: thealyssaproject.com
Spotlight On Fire
In Scene 1, Noel left Haddontown Plays and Players after her final closing show (HPP), refusing to say goodbye outloud. At the same time, the characters of her in-progress book about theatre camp were trapped inside their own version of HPP. They've now been trapped for a couple of days. At home now, Noel is writing down ideas for the story, as the teens pass the time in their HPP, and begin to wonder how to bust themselves out.
Halfway through this scene, a new actor steps in for Julian.
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Excerpt featuring Isabella Robinson (Noel), Emily Rosales (Daizee), Marley Mathias (Shaun), Scout Graham (Ambrose), Mengyuan Chen (Kira), Emily Dzioba / Brian Jones (Julian)
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In May 2012, I sat in my bedroom and wrote the first draft of the first chapter of a book. I wrote about five teens, who were each inspired by my love of my theatre camp.
In May 2021, sitting in the same spot, I logged online to a Zoom waiting room with the title of “Spotlight on Fire reading.”
What happened in between those nine years is what I theatricalize in Spotlight on Fire.
On every first-draft anniversary, I’ve visited the document and left notes for future-me. For the first couple of Mays, my notes sound like early congratulations for the book I dreamed I’d write. Then, they sound like messages of regret, for the book I never knew how to write.
Once I entered college and began identifying as a playwright to myself--Spotlight on Fire came out as a play to me. It wouldn’t be a story about those five teens--it would be about an author’s relationship with the story of those five teens.
My question became: what happens to characters when authors don’t write about them? How do they strategize to reappear in their creator’s life?
Spotlight on Fire builds a world in which characters are as much the authors of their own stories as the writer is. It’s about discovering why you were made.
Being a Storyteller Studio member meant I could show my play’s second draft to a cohort of supportive artists. In this autumn of 2021, I am working on my third draft, striving to deepen the character silhouettes of these five best friends who stood waiting for me in a document for almost a decade. I'll be submitting this draft for play development opportunities.
I am indebted to the Storyteller Studio for welcoming Spotlight on Fire into the world.