YPF is a citywide playwriting competition that gives voice to teenagers while promoting the art of writing for the stage. Currently celebrating its 39th year, this school-oriented program helps students craft one-act plays for an April submission deadline. Each year, professional artists work with up to four winning playwrights to workshop, stage and produce their scripts as part of Pegasus’ main stage season.
By offering access to theatre professionals, YPF enhances language arts, encourages independent, high-level thinking and strong personal values, and influences career development. Participation in the Festival also improves students’ social-emotional learning, all instrumental skills as identified in core curriculum standards.
“I knew I wanted to do a play on police brutality… Once I knew what I wanted to talk about, it was a matter of really enhancing the creativity.”
– Sejahari Saulter-Villegas, (Race to the Finish – YPF30)
“Like my main character [during quarantine], I had a lot of time on my hands to reflect on the choices/decisions I made, the opportunities I did and did not take, and the people I kept around or left behind”
– Laylah Freeman (The Little Things – YPF35)
Pegasus Theatre’s Chicago Young Playwrights Festival has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Time, Architectural Digest, Barron’s, Travel & Leisure, Sports, and Forbes. YPF has been honored by the city of Chicago and The Joseph Jefferson Committee. Channel 20 in Chicago aired a half-hour documentary on the 1996 Young Playwrights Festival. In 2002, the Festival was featured on Channel 11’s program on the Arts across Illinois. The Chicago Tribune and more recently The ChicagoReader feature winning playwrights every year.
“There are so many little things that aren’t necessarily in the writing, like these directorial nuances or cues… All the things that these professional actors and directors added just magnified what I had imagined by so much.”
Clark Tavis (Office, Etc. – YPF39)
