Customer Reviews

Center Stage: One-Act Plays for Teenage Readers

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The plays in this collection attempt to tackle issues important to teens and end up sounding like badly written tv screenplays where everything is "deep" but resolved way too quickly. The dialogue is unrealistic and the characters shallow. I can't see handing any of these scripts out to high school students, expecting them to take the plays seriously.

The moral behind most of these plays is really a great attempt to teach a valuable lesson. However, these short plays offer no true insight into the world of on stage plays. Many readers will find the plays short and direct. These plays offer very little suspense and are a bore to read. Save time and money; buy Shakespeare.

So far, of the YA play anthologies I've bought (and I've purchased a number) this is one of my favorites. This is well-written YA lit. The other reviewer who hazards a comparison to Shakespeare is a bit daft. I couldn't teach Shakespeare to my freshmen - that requires a level of literacy they don't yet have.

Also, these plays are expressly written for teens so I don't think it's fair to denigrate them because they don't stand up to Shakespeare's lofty standard. The plays are pretty good YA stuff. Several of them even received ALA awards.

I teach low literacy students. Getting them to read anything often involves huge amounts of assistance and prayer for any chance of success. Yet they were begging to read some of these stories and even asking if they could borrow the plays. In general, I find those kids respond very well to plays.

These plays are littered with teachable moments from the Scholastic Books crowd of writers. "The Driver's Test" is a particularly funny play about a teen who fails the road test .... again. Funny, relevant stuff. It practically teaches itself.

There are some clunkers, too (the Walter Dean Meyers piece plays out like a poor man's Sartre), but there's enough good stuff to overlook them. Also, most of the plays are just about the right length (20-30 pages) for my purposes and stay relatively consistent at that length.

Honestly, I think "The Driver's Test" alone is worth the price of the book. Recommended for teens and teachers.