"You can be friends with anyone, no matter who you are."

 

This is the moral of Jane Stirling's play, The True Power of Friendship.  A third grader at Key Elementary, Jane has been working with Young Playwrights' Theater as part of her arts programming at Fillmore Arts Center. 

 

Her play will be featured at this month's New Writer's Now! on January 28^th.  When her parents heard her play had been chosen to be featured at our event, her mother wrote, "We're so happy to see that her abilities are finally catching up with her imagination."

 

Jane has a sparkling imagination.  "When I was three, I thought I wanted to be a magician," she says.  This love of magic inspired her play about a witch and a dog who are each in search of a true friend.   Jane has given each of her fifteen stuffed toy dogs individual names.  There's Bagel the beagle, Jackie the Jack Russell Terrier and her first love, DD. 

 

"Next year I'm going to test out Santa Claus to see if he's real because I know my parents won't ever get me a dog, but Santa Claus might bring me one.  If I see a big wiggling box under the tree, it might be an iguana, but I prefer a dog," Jane says.

 

She's already imagining her next play. "It's about a kid who wants to grow up to be the most famous person in the world. He finds a book about hypnotism. So he hypnotizes everybody in the whole world, starting with the US and ending in Antarctica," Jane says. "He even hypnotizes the penguins and stuff," she giggles. "But then he realizes that he shouldn't have done that because maybe all those people would have liked him anyway."

 

Jane advises other writers to go ahead and write "because even if your play doesn't get picked, that play is going to be special to you either way."

 

Jane has aspirations outside of writing.  "I want to be an acrobat," she says, grinning widely.  "I have a swingset in my backyard, and on warm nights I swing really high.  Then I jump off from like 50 feet in the air!"