All The Write Plays: Freshman Eliza King pursues her passion for theatre through the Coterie

The prompt: Write a short scene, set in a bookstore, with mother and daughter characters and an additional external conflict. 

Freshman Eliza King picked up her pencil and got to work. In just under two hours, she had written seven pages outlining the complex lives and dynamic bond of protagonist Lindsay and her mother Sydney and their struggle of picking out a book for their uncle in the Reading Reptile bookstore.

The scene was the final task of the playwriting class she took through the 2022 KC Fringe Festival and what got submitted as part of her application to the Coterie’s Young Playwrights Roundtable.

“I think about dialogue and try to find the happy medium between what sounds natural and what conveys my point,” King said. “I also think about how to give each and every one of my characters a different set of values, different beliefs [and] different traits, because you want a well-rounded story to really have it all.”

And that character building process is exactly what stood out to the playwright and facilitator Hollis Willhoit, who taught the Fringe Festival workshop — and it’s what ultimately convinced The Coterie’s Producing Artistic Director Jeff Church to invite King to The Roundtable. 

“Eliza was easily the strongest and most engaged writer in the room,” Willhoit said. “She approached each prompt with grace and excellence.”

The Young Playwrights Roundtable is an invite-only playwriting club for high schoolers around the Kansas City metro area to develop their playwriting skills and seek feedback from their peers.

“It was just expert how she blends her characters [into the script],” Church said. “It felt very authentic.”

From her acceptance into The Roundtable to her numerous acting roles, King’s success in theatre early on in life isn’t just a coincidence — it’s a testament to her passion.

For four years now, her summers have been spent at theatre camps, her weekends at auditions and her after-school free time reading scripts and memorizing lines.

King’s first theatre experience was in 2019 when her parents signed her up for a local Theatre For Young America’s summer camp. During the month-long workshop, campers improvised and wrote their own play, learned theatre tech skills like setting up microphones and stage lights and performed the show at the end of the camp. She was hooked.

“I think that there’s something about theatre that’s just opening up and trusting others with the vulnerability that is acting and I think that kind of stuck with me,” King said.

Since then, King has acted in seven more productions with various companies and has begun writing plays herself — and now she gets to continue this passion through The Roundtable.

A typical Roundtable meeting looks like the twenty-something members huddled in the house seats of the Coterie, listening to what project each member is currently working on and giving feedback on those production.

Church describes the theater during Roundtable nights as a fun, collaborative environment. One aspect that makes it unique for the members is that, since the playwrights usually read a small section of their plays or screenplays at each session, the teens are always eager to hear the “next installment” of the works, as if they were watching an epic TV drama series.

Outside the Coterie, King will continue auditioning for roles in local and school shows. Her most recent role is Tahani Al-Jamil in senior Nora Alferman’s Frequent Friday production of “The Good Place.” 

What gave King an advantage over the other actors auditioning was her playwriting skills, and how she used them to study the character she played.

“With playing roles, you really have to be able to look into the character, and sometimes that means getting into the head of the writer and thinking about why they wrote it [that] way and what their intention was,” King said.

Going into the future, Eliza wants to pursue both acting and playwriting through East theatre and The Coterie — her ultimate goal is to have her work performed onstage by a cast.

“I would love to, at some point, have actors do some of what I’ve written,” King said. “And also [I want] to just be able to collaborate with others, and to be able to get other people’s opinions on what I write, which is why I’m excited about the Roundtable.”