Playwright Prodigy: 17 Going on Greatness

This is a story about a young girl. A young girl whose doting mother spent hours telling stories from the time when she was a young girl -- stories about love and yearning and manic friendships and the hallucinatory effects of certain psychedelic drugs.

One day the young girl decided to write down all the stories and turn them into a little play.

Another day, the play was produced by a team of professional actors and designers for a large audience at the Kennedy Center, and people started using words like "prodigy" and forecasting a future as "one of the greatest of the playwrights of the next generation" for the girl, who was then maybe just barely old enough to drive.

Luckily, cherub-cheeked Phoebe Rusch is smart enough and sweet enough to blush, to smile and to walk away so she can get back to work.

Rusch, a Chicago girl now all of 17, is in Washington on her own for the summer, tweaking the script that won praise at the Kennedy Center last year and watching it come to life in a full-scale production by the Theater Alliance.

"My mom is really worried about me taking the Metro," she says, teenage eyes toward the sky. "She thinks I'm gonna get mugged on a train."

Rusch wrote the play, " 3/4 of a Mass for St. Vivian," when she was 15 and submitted it for consideration in the VSA Arts Playwright Discovery program, a contest for young writers. The top prize, which she landed, was a one-time Kennedy Center production directed by Paul-Douglas Michnewicz, co-founder of Theater Alliance. But Michnewicz, who has directed the winning student plays for more than a decade, decided once wasn't enough in this instance and lobbied to have "Mass" professionally restaged by his own company.

"What's striking is that this is a play about ideas," Michnewicz says. "It's a play about people struggling with ideas -- you don't find that very often. It's extraordinary for anyone at any age to have written this. To have an author that was 15 is remarkable."

The play is drawn from tales Rusch's mother relayed about a wild, haunted teenage friendship with a girl born to the fate of an incurable disease. "Mass" captures the dawning of that friendship, set against a black deadline from the moment it began, and the girls' quest for earthly pleasures, unfailing intimacies and elusive evidence that life has purpose.

It may be a disservice to focus on the author's youth, not just her work. But there she is, in her strapless, vintage-style baby doll dress and her black Converse lace-ups and tousled hair that might be a bit more orange than God intended, and she's talking about how glad she is to not have to take math this year and how opera is an acquired taste, like wine, though legally she's a few years away from acquiring that particular taste.

In her presence, both poised and lively, it's impossible not to wonder about origins of talent. Was Phoebe Rusch, playwright, born as such, or crafted into it? The daughter of a French-horn-playing father and artistic mother, neither of whom made careers out of their talents, Rusch describes her childhood as one of literature and theater and art, but not of affluence: Her mom works three jobs, including one at a deli, she says, and her dad delivers pizzas. "I was really lucky," she says. "I was given a lot of exposure to a lot of really great things at an early age in life and taught to appreciate them, which is a real blessing."

An only child, she filled her hours penning short stories heavy on dialogue -- a signature and a harbinger -- and turned the hobby into a ticket out of a public school she loathed. A portfolio of creative-writing pieces, including stories and scripts, was enough to garner a scholarship to Interlochen Arts Academy, a prestigious Michigan boarding school where a ballet prodigy in one room can discuss quantum physics with a teenage violin virtuoso in the next.

"An intellectual pressure cooker," Rusch calls it, but goes quickly back to her refrain on fate and gratitude. "I got really lucky. It's such a blessing to be there."

Regardless of their origin, talent and initiative have begotten opportunity for young Rusch, though rumors of her career as a woman of the stage could be greatly exaggerated. She wants to be a diplomat. Or maybe a human rights lawyer. She has already written a play about a relationship between a Guantanamo Bay interrogator and his prisoner and had thought about becoming a foreign correspondent but doesn't want to imagine a life where she documents atrocities and does nothing more to stop them. As a diplomat, on the other hand . . .

Michnewicz, who seems to have become Rusch's in loco parentis for the summer, hears his playwright say all this and declares for the second time: "I should say that I think Phoebe will be one of the great playwrights of the next generation. I'm just glad that we're part of the inception of her career."

Heavy praise and heavy burden. Rusch stares down at her sneakers. If the world is lucky, she'll find her way to a life that includes all sorts of good works.

3/4 of a Mass for St. Vivian Theater Alliance at the H Street Playhouse 866-811-4111 Through Sept. 3