![\"Meredith](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/levy.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Beth JoJack \u201998<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
All across the country, actors are bringing the words of Meredith Levy to life.<\/p>\n
Sixteen productions of Levy\u2019s full-length drama Decision Height<\/em> have been staged since the play won the Harold and Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award in 2014. \u201cIt\u2019s being done all over the place by other colleges and high schools,\u201d said Levy, who works as alumnae events coordinator at Hollins and is a student in the M.F.A. program in playwriting,<\/p>\n Levy wrote the play as her thesis for her senior year. She first sat down to write without much of a plan, other than she knew she wanted to create strong female characters.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to write for my friends,\u201d Levy said. \u201cI sort of took it as a challenge to write an all-female play and make characters that are interesting and dynamic and not stereotypes.\u201d<\/p>\n In that early stage, Levy had firm ideas about what she didn\u2019t want the play to be.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn’t want to write a family drama,\u201d she said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t interested in writing a play about sisters or mothers and daughters. I also wasn\u2019t interested in writing a play about college because that was too on the nose.\u201d<\/p>\n While searching for a group of women in history to use as inspiration, Levy read about the Women\u2019s Airforce Service Pilots, women trained to pilot aircraft during World War II. \u201cI was so ashamed I had never heard of them before,\u201d Levy said. [Decision height<\/em> is an aviation term referring to the altitude that determines whether the pilot is able to land using visual references or must abandon the effort and try again.]<\/p>\n As she read about the women\u2019s training, Levy immediately saw parallels between what she had experienced during four years at a single-sex school. She felt certain a Hollins audience would identify with their story.<\/p>\n \u201cI honestly didn\u2019t think it would go anywhere beyond Hollins,\u201d Levy said. \u201cIt\u2019s such a wonderful sort of accident that the play resonates with people beyond single-sex institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n Decision Height<\/em> went on to win numerous honors from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), including recognition in the categories of Outstanding Production of a New Work and Distinguished Director of a New Work for Ernie Zulia, director of the Hollins Theatre Institute.<\/p>\n After experiencing so much success with her first play, Levy found it \u201cextremely daunting\u201d to tackle her next project. Luckily, she had to write a new full-length work for a course in the M.F.A. program, which gave her the push she needed.<\/p>\n Partly inspired by the spring semester she spent on the Hollins Abroad-London program her junior year, Levy wrote about the lives of the occupants of a car on the London Underground. \u201cIt was very long and very wordy and not great,\u201d Levy said of that first draft.<\/p>\n Todd Ristau, director of Hollins\u2019 Playwright\u2019s Lab, staged a reading of the play, then called Cut and Cover<\/em>, in 2013. Afterward, Levy made some edits. \u201cBut it didn’t seem that much better,\u201d she said, \u201cso I sort of put it in a drawer.\u201d<\/p>\n By the spring of 2015, Levy was ready to try again with fresh eyes. She submitted it to the New Voices Playfest put on by Atlantic Stage in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, which staged a reading. That summer, Levy worked closely on further revisions with Robert Moss, a visiting faculty member in the Playwright\u2019s Lab. Moss founded Playwrights Horizons in New York City, which produced more than 150 new plays during his tenure. \u201c[The play] ended up being 50 pages shorter and much improved,\u201d Levy said.<\/p>\n \u201cEach of the characters Meredith has so carefully created are wonderfully flawed,\u201d Ristau said, \u201cbut in the process of becoming better by figuring out what\u2019s real, what\u2019s worth pursuing, and what\u2019s worth giving up.\u201d<\/p>\n Levy now describes the play\u2014which won the 2016 KCACTF David L. Shelton Playwriting Project award and the organization\u2019s 2016 designation of Distinguished Production of a New Work\u2014as having \u201carrived,\u201d a feat she isn\u2019t sure she would have completed if she hadn\u2019t had so many opportunities to work with actors and other professionals.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s hard to get into a room with a play,\u201d Levy said. \u201cThey usually want the play to be good before they commit to it. I feel really blessed to have such wonderful collaborators with the Hollins playwriting program.\u201d<\/p>\n Beth JoJack is a Roanoke writer who contributes frequently to Hollins<\/em> magazine.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Playwright Meredith Dayna Levy \u201912 has scaled the heights and gone underground to connect stories with an audience. By Beth JoJack \u201998 All across the country, actors are bringing the words of Meredith Levy to life. Sixteen productions of Levy\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6841,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-6722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-spring-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6725,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions\/6725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Coupler\"](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/coupler.jpg\")
Ristau directed a production of the revised play, now called Coupler: A Whimsical Underground Comedy<\/em>, as part of the Hollins-Mill Mountain Theatre Winter Festival of New Works in January in Roanoke and another reading at the Robert Moss Theater in New York City in March.<\/p>\n