Theater Camp Writing Workshop (2026)

Theater camp has closed for 2026. An action packed eight days, full of theater games, stage combat, prop and set piece construction, costume design, more theater games, song and choreography, and a lot of playwriting.

We added the writing component after Covid, or rather, I did. I enjoyed leading a writing session for a different camp we were affiliated with in 2008 – the goal was poetry then, not plays, I had no idea what I was doing (I usually didn’t in those days, I was only forty after all) but the campers who responded to it went at it hard. Some kids love to write.

Some, however, would rather kick themselves in the face than write, and I respect that. And so, for our camp (collective our) I have insisted it be optional, presented opposite some other activity.

Most choose the other activity, which is fine. It’s preferable. This year it was at the same time as craft, and I had a dedicated crew of between four and eight for each one hour session – that was also different this season, an entire hour! And there was one period for high school aged campers, and another for middle school aged campers.

I had prepared prompt cards. We would create ten minutes of prompt-inspired free writing. Sometimes that would be followed by a debrief, or take another ten minutes to create dialogue inspired by the prompt. This was the challenge for the middle school aged campers, several of whom wanted to compose narrative. Creating action through dialogue was new to them.

As the days progressed, I would still offer prompts, but change up the assignment slightly – write a new short play based on your prompt-based free writing, or continue something you have already been working on.

They would ask, but can’t I write about -x- instead? And I would say yes. Can I work on something I was already working on outside of camp? And I would say yes. I had to remind them that this wasn’t school, I wouldn’t be collecting their notebooks, I wouldn’t ever be looking in their notebooks. They could write whatever they like. But I would continue encouraging them to write plays.

To that end I provided professional templates to follow, and we spent time talking about plays they had seen. I gave a brief description of the Aristotelian unities.

The last day, Thursday, we held an informal reading of their new works, with all of their peers as the audience. There were six or seven* short scripts, from the silly to sinister, and took volunteers from the entire assembly to stand and read and perform them to great appreciation and generous laughter.

Given the opportunity, I will expand on the material. It is challenging to develop a curriculum requiring this kind of deep focus when they are all sorts of variables that can be thrown at you. It’s a seven day workshop (six this year, really – we needed to catch up on props and sets on Wednesday) which has at times been forty-five minutes, then thirty minutes, and now an hour. Campers are asked to write for ten minutes then stop when some really want to keep going while others write for two minutes, get bored and start distracting their friends.

So, that’s a goal for next year, a more flexible lesson plan. But who wants to think about next year? Summer has only begun!

How I Spent My Summer (2025)

Bridal Falls, Goat Island, NY

Three months. Summer has been ending earlier and earlier, this year it began earlier, too.

To celebrate our eldest’s graduation from college, we planned an international journey, a vacation in Spain. We hadn’t taken our children on a transatlantic expedition since they were very, very young, not since I brought I Hate This to the UK. They don’t even remember that trip, only in photos.

First, however, a snag. I thought I had a valid passport, and I did, but it was due to expire. We noted this days before our departure. Renewal necessitated an urgent drive to Buffalo, which was in its way a not unpleasant prelude to the season, which included a fine cocktail in the hotel bar, and a rainy day stroll in Niagara Falls State Park, waiting for my ID to be processed.

Fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes in the presence of Bridal Falls. I live for moments like this.

Bilbao, Spain

When folks ask what my favorite part of our Spanish vacation was, you will forgive me for saying it was the opportunity to spend ten, responsibility-free days in the company of the three people I love most in the world. Social anxiety issues aside, our kids are excellent travelers. They are not only open to interesting, sometimes unplanned experiences, unusual spaces and food, they are also very good communicators and check in when they need a break. I am also better at this than I was as a young person, and that is thanks to them.

Our eldest’s achievements inspired this excursion, so the emphasis was on art. We saw the Prado, and the Reina Sophia. We attended the Guggenheim Bilbao, and finally the Segrada Familia. However, we also took in a little jazz with the boy, happening upon a barside trio outside the Guggenheim, and the David Pastor Quintet in Barcelona. I tagged the bandleader on my socials; a brief interaction revealed the connection between him and the head of the boy’s department at UC. Small world, indeed.

Great Lakes Theater Camp

I am always seeking new and better ways to lead, instruct and create. This is as true at our annual summer arts camp as in any other arena, and not only did the team put on some pretty amazing performances, I was developing new ideas as how to best curate an all too brief playwriting workshop, and how best to showcase the work.

We had about a half hour, every day (which is to say, for only six or seven days) for a small cohort of middle school aged campers to write short plays, which then received staged readings by high school aged campers. Everyone agreed the work was good, and I have some powerful thoughts about how to make the experience more exciting for all involved next year.

Peter Voinovich
"Churchill at War"
Actors Summit Productions

The eldest and I turned out for the No Kings protest where I spotted Fred Armisen casually walking past om his way to the opening of the SNL exhibit at the Rock Hall. By his gaze he seemed either impressed or bewildered by the Free Stamp.

We’ve also been attending a lot of Guardians games. It’s been a season of ups and downs, for the time being I’m withholding judgment. I have also had the chance to meet up with old college friends (emphasis on old) including seeing my roommate Peter onstage for the first time since, well, college, playing Churchill in a solo performance in Akron.

Much of my mental energy has been focused on The Right Room, of course, and my physical energy as well. While rehearsals were taking place I was acting as de facto sound designer and also curating and even creating props for the production.

Zach Palumbo, Nicole Coury
"The Right Room"
In Rehearsal

The BorderLight Festival was remarkable. I posted about our performances last month, it was all up and over on the same day. The next day, a Saturday, I saw a half dozen shows. 

Highlights include Impact Award Winner Sincerely, (The Diary Play) by Bryanna Lee, She Was a Conquistawhore by Rachel O'Hanlon-Rodriguez, performed in The Snug at Parnell’s (where Give Me Your Keys produced my play Step Nine two years ago) and Eric Coble’s The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus, masterfully performed by Tia Shearer Bassett.

Then we got the heck out of town.

Zach Palumbo, Nicole Coury
"The Right Room"
BorderLight Theater Festival
Photo: Daren Stahl

I try not to look forward to our annual journey to Maine. It will come, as it (almost) always does, but once it’s gone, so is the summer. This year, however, we were joined not only by the children but also their partners. It was a joyful and relaxing celebration of family and fellowship, replete with day trips and afternoons on the rock just reading, great food and drink and conversation.

Our last night on the road, stopping in Little Falls, New York, I had another chance to indulge in falling waters, writ small.

Now we’re back and home and at work and August has barely begun. But this weekend we’re going to Cedar Point.

This Is Not The Play (workshop)

One year (it was 2008) we were conducting a summer camp for CMSD middle school aged kids, and each member of our team chose one discipline to focus on; we had our dance captain, visual art instructor, music director, acting coach. I was to teach creative writing. I had never taught writing before in my life.

In preparation, I requested only two supply items; a Moleskine for each camper and an inexhaustible supply of pens. Yes, the kids could have used spiral bound notebooks, or even lined, loose-leaf paper. But I figured it this way, if they were going to take writing – during the summer – seriously, I wanted them to have something special to write in.

It was a good experience. We played with rhetorical devices. A “ya mama” joke is just a metaphor, right? We flipped that and wrote metaphors about ourselves, comparisons which could be amusing in their grandiose self-confidence. "I'm so cool they put me in lemonade." We also wrote poems and other bits of prose.

Of course, for some campers the time we spent together was torturous. Some people just don’t want to write, they definitely don’t want to write during summer vacation. I don’t blame them. Some were so resistant to the idea of writing I just sent them to work with another one of the instructors. It was a camp, it was supposed to be fun.

The company I work for has been hosting a different summer arts camp in another part of greater Cleveland since 2010, but I never considered suggesting I teach writing again until last year. We made it elective; there was time mapped out for visual arts, you could do that or you could write. I didn’t want to have a single person engaged in the writing workshop who didn’t want to be there.

It was just a one hour block. I began our second day of camp making the offer; anyone who wanted to write instead of do art, even if it’s just one person, I would be happy to work with them. Most chose art, I got six people. That was perfect.

We found an area of quietude, camp can be pretty noisy with kids from elementary to high school all over the place. It was a relief in the late morning to be able to concentrate with our small cadre. We sat around a table in the house of the auditorium, the lights were dimmer than the brightness of the stage. I played instrumental jazz on my phone, or noise for focusing from an app I'd discovered.

My lesson plan was mostly the same each day, and inspired by the daily writing ritual I had employed to create the short play project. Unlike with my solitary, quarantine era writing, however, each brief writing period with the campers included the opportunity for a debrief and reflection.

1. Free Write (10 min.)

Debrief:

• How was that?
• What did you discover?
• What surprised you?

2. Single Word Prompt (10 min.)
They were asked to choose one from three suggested one-word prompts.*
Examples:

• Darkness - what we can’t see
• Normal - what does that mean to you?
• Frozen - a moment in your life you wish you could freeze and preserve and keep

Similar debrief questions, adding, "Would you like to share what you wrote about?"

3. Dialogue (10 min.)
Choose a central question inspired by your response to the previous prompt.

• Create dialogue between two characters, no names, no specific gender, no stage directions (Unless you feel any of these things are necessary, then go ahead. It’s your work.)

Sharing the work, al fresco.

That was the first lesson. The next day, when we broke into these groups, I made it clear that if you changed your mind and would rather create visual art than writing, that was cool. And also that if anyone else wanted to try the writing, that would be cool, too.

To my delight, we pretty much had six people each day for the rest of camp. Five were committed, the sixth was usually someone new who tried it out once, maybe twice.

From the second day forward, the third ten minutes could be for creating something new from that day’s chosen prompt, or campers could continue or rewrite something they had previously written.

By the end of the first week we had a name for the writing group. Early on, when I proposed writing from a prompt, one of the campers asked, “Is this the play? Are we writing the play?”

“This is not the play,” I told them, which struck them as amusing, the way I said it. It became a daily reminder about the free writing periods. “This is not the play.”

We also wrote some poems, we read our work aloud. I encouraged them to choose one piece to polish, type up and share with the rest of the middle and high school age campers, and to get other kids to read and perform their new scripts.

During our last session together, at the end of camp, we talked about submissions, competitions, their writing aspirations. We recently announced the dates for this year’s camp. I’m looking forward to it. I think there will be writing.

*Source: Think Written | 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Notes on Camp: Day Eight

It is true, with the improv club on our penultimate day, we could spend the entire day rehearsing and preparing for our performance.

To think. We weren’t even sure if we could do this. Would anyone sign up? Would they agree to masks? And how would that go? I’ll tell you, it went fine. Only the photos will remind me that we were even wearing them. And no one got sick, not at this camp.

Family and friends of the campers arrived in time for a 2:30 PM performance. The Jesters & Fools (9-11 group) presented an original play about oracles before our teams presented their short plays and Shakespeare scenes, before the entire camp came together for our final song and dance number. It was a one-hour show! Created in eight days!

The short plays, by the way, were presented in a manner inspired by the Neo-Futurists. We called it “Ten Short Plays in Twenty Minutes” with the caveat that there were neither ten plays nor were we performing them in twenty minutes, though when all was done I believe we did execute all eleven plays in twenty minutes or less.

On the drive in this morning, I was already thinking about next year, when hopefully I will have a better opportunity to organize the improvisation workshops. The first week is for a close study of the mechanics or techniques, the second concentrating on a singular character for use in a (short) long form improv.

Now, if you will excuse me. I am going on vacation.

Notes on Camp: Day Seven

Another Improv Club is in the books, and I am very surprised and relieved with how it all worked out.

The Crows and Mechanicals each had their own genre (mystery and soap opera, respectively) and after a brief introduction of each character, they were provided an episode title and called upon to perform two person scenes that took place in whatever space I provided (The abandoned MacGruder Place! The dunes on the beach at the Cape!) concluding with a “slacker” scene in which each character cycled in and out of three person scenes in turn.

And we consumed a massive amount of pop, chips and cookies. Because nightclub.

On any other year, I would head down to our rehearsal space to pick up additional costumes or props for our rehearsed "splash" scenes as necessary, depending on what scenes we were creating. Kelly insisted (and I bless her for it) that we spend the rest of the day creating everything we didn’t already have out of paper, cardboard, watches of fabric, duct tape, hot glue, paint and their imaginations.

Self-directed work is the best work. It really, really is. Bless you, Maria Montessori.

The end of the day, after cleaning up, I got to kick back and watch Tim and Asia coach all the campers in the choreography for the closing song for our performance … which is tomorrow!

Notes on Camp: Day Six

“I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.” 

- Governor Tarkin, "Star Wars" (1977)

The improv club was created as a way for the campers to show off their skills in a manner in which they did not need to feel the pressure of an audience of anyone other than their peers (i.e., their parents). If a comment is accidentally blue – trust me, I actively discourage this – no harm, no foul.

This year, however, we haven’t taken the same amount of time to develop these skills. It all comes down to their innate ability to riff, the characters they have been thinking about since last week (we haven’t actually played with any of them to date), a set of camper-generated prompts in the form of episode titles, and the heavy hand of the narrator: me.

So, anyway. We had a lot to do today, and a lot planned. Short scenes and Shakespeare in the morning, final improv rehearsal in the afternoon. What we did not expect was that the fire alarms would be tested for over an hour and a half. The sound was loud and disturbed – and it was ninety degrees outside. We found the band room to be slightly less horribly loud, and played games and, yes, practiced some improv, until lunch.

These things happen. How you cope with them is what matters.

Notes on Camp: Day Five

And we’re back. In days past, this would be a restart, greeting new campers for the second week, beginning a second-week lesson plan which tracks the first week, but not entirely the same because many campers took both weeks.

So, instead of restarting, we are resetting – taking this opportunity to revise expectations based on the personalities of the players involved. As our Crows and Mechanicals are full of clowns, he have assigned two cuttings from Shakespeare’s comedies to compliment the “Battle Royale” which now surrounds a third scene, one from Henry IV, part 1.

This took up a great part of the day, which was fine. We have that time to spare. We were still able to spend time running our short plays, stage combat, and concluding the day with musical practice.

Are we doing too much? I do not know. Are they up for the challenge? Yes, they are!

Notes on Camp: Day Four

Camper walks in wearing a T-shirt reading “Be Kind.” Gray shirt, simple black font. I want my own version of this shirt.

The memory feature of Facebook has been rolling out camp memories every single day. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

We began the day by moving one of the Jester & Fools up to the Upstart Crows. This happens, one of the older kids from one of the younger groups is not challenged by what they are working on, or sometimes we notice that all of their friends are in the older group, and we adjust accordingly.

I asked the team to write for five minutes, reflecting upon what they had discovered, or discovered about themselves in the past three days. Then they shared their names and pronouns (so our newest member could hear them) followed by a one or two word summation of what they have discovered.

It was gratifying to learn all the wonderful things they had picked up, and that they are happy to be here. We need to reflect sometimes, to remember where we were, and how far we have come. Their telling me reminds me of this, too.

Today we ran through all eleven short plays. I was so impressed, not only at what a fantastic playwright I am, but how well my work can be interpreted by middle and high school students. I really need to create a book.

Notes on Camp: Day Three

“That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life.”
- Jonathan Richman

Summer is different. The smell of the gas pump, which is an entirely ordinary aroma, takes on a nostalgic pong when it is received standing in sight of the highway, your car filled with family and luggage.

Going to camp is different. I’m wearing shorts to work. I pick up a latte for the forty minute drive across the city. The windows are open, and I am singing at the top of my voice. It feels so much more relaxed.

The days are crammed with activity. Campers have now selected short plays on which to concentrate, we will begin rehearsal of those in earnest tomorrow. Kelly is not only staging the Battle Royale, but including verses from Shakspeare to tie them together.

The improv sessions are loud, hilarious and dizzying. My only question is whether or not the preparation will come together into a performance. But, we’re having fun, right?

Notes on Camp: Day Two

Afternoons, Kelly and I trade off between the Upstart Crows (middle school) and Rude Mechanicals (high school). She is guiding them through a Shakespearean “Battle Royale” while I lead them through improvisation exercises.

In this way, the campers are getting a lot of specialized attention in two different aspects of performance. I don’t think we’ve ever provided as much time on stage combat before, and never with as an experienced mentor as Kelly.

As for improv club, I was inspired by someone one of our interns said during the planning sessions, comparing long-form improv to a role playing game – which is another way of looking at the work we use to do in the Night Kitchen; concentrating on creating one very specific character for the actor to create and embody. They, the established character, can enter into any scenario, handle conflict and create relationships, pushing a storyline forward without inconsistency.

That’s the plan, anyway. Wish me luck!

Notes on Camp: Day One

Dutiful interns Sylvia & Connor

Something old, something new. Mornings, Kelly and I work in tandem with students aged twelve to eighteen. It’s been three years since we held in-person camp, and I was curious as to how many of these kids would have attended our camp before. And it was around half. I was shocked. I was so pleased. 

How many had aged out? How many had folks were weren’t ready to send their kids to an experience like this? But so many were back, and it is so good to see them again.

We are wearing masks. Yes, it’s a drag. But I wouldn’t do it otherwise, and I am grateful for the accommodation. They want to be here and so do we.

We worked together to create a list of expectations for the week, to which we could all agree. Some expectations involve playing certain games. Others involve providing mutual respect and attention. We got onto the same page.

Campers got to know each other a little, introduce each other, learn names. And then we got to work! And this year, guess what? We’re working on (among other things) the Short Play Project. I have a tranche of two-person plays, many of which are perfect for middle and high school aged kids to work on.

Exactly how we do that, I will make note of as the week progresses. Today, we had cold reads, tearing through a number of them, but not enough apparently, as they were eager to keep reading them aloud for each other.

Notes on Camp: Day Zero

Rude Mechanicals, 2019

We emerge from quarantine, if not from pandemic. Since 2010 Great Lakes Theater has held a two-week summer arts camp at Berea-Midpark High School (formerly Camp Theater!) for kids from kindergarten to high school. I am happy to say there were campers who returned year after year.

Scenes from Club Improv (2019)

Two years ago, when the inevitable decision to cancel camp was made, we offered a virtual version for a week in June 2020. It was simply part of the general contribution of goodwill provided during that season of disappointment and uncertainty. We got to see the familiar faces of kids we would not be meeting in person for some time, if ever again.

Last year we didn’t have any kind of camp at all.

This is a year of change, as the camp will be hosted in a new location, and incorporate music and dance into our lesson plans. This year I am working closely with Kelly Elliott, as we team-teach middle and high school aged campers in stage combat and improvisation.

Also? A trio of interns, Ally, Connor and Sylvia, all former campers, who either graduated from high school this or last year. We have instructed them since they were kids, now they will work alongside us.

Good Lord, I could cry. I'm really looking forward to this.