Stacy Alynn, a resident of West Windsor and a librarian at the West Windsor Library, received the Best Script Award at Theater In a Day, held at State Theater in New Brunswick on February 11. Chosen as a writer and director, she received a theme, a prop, and names of actors at 8 p.m. on February 10. She had that evening to write a 10-minute play to rehearse the next day and present a few hours later. Six plays were presented — all created in only 24 hours.##M:[more]##
The theme was “The moment that something great is discovered or invented” and each group received an identical prop — a bundle of sticks of dynamite. “My play, Lighten Up, was an over-the-top farce about a depressed princess who must find the key to happiness by her bedtime — or the next day, her parents will send her for a therapeutic bath in a mudpit full of leeches,” says Alynn. “The show went very well” One of her cast members, a Rutgers student, received the Best Actor award.
Alynn was raised on Staten Island, where she was active in community theater as both an actress (HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Amadeus) and a director (Hansel and Gretel). She has a bachelor’s degree in theater arts from SUNY New Paltz, where she directed The Women. Her original works were produced when she became a two-time winner of the New Paltz Players’ Playwrighting contest, first with The Last Morning (a one-act about the suicide of Adolf Hitler’s niece), then with Shelter (a drama about children raised in a bomb shelter after a nuclear war). The Last Morning was also awarded honorable mention in a one-act play contest.
After receiving a masters of professional writing from USC, Alynn worked in Hollywood as an entertainment journalist and story analyst, and was hired by Stephen J. Cannell to judge the Final Draft Screenwriting Competition. Her own screenplay, Kid King, ranked in the top 10 percent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Nicholl Fellowship and was optioned by Oscar nominee John Herman Shaner.
A West Windsor resident since 2001, she has worked at the library since 2003. Alynn also models for the Red Dress Shoppe, a company based in Eagle Rock, California. Most of the business is online and Alynn is modeling a “Posey dress” at www.reddressshoppe.com/Dresses.htm (See photo above).
She sings regularly with the Arbeiter Manner und Damen Chor, the oldest active German singing society in the city of Trenton. She was last seen on stage in Somerset as a Belly Dancer in Rakkasah East, an annual Middle Eastern dance festival.
Allyn has never entered a similar competition before. “It’s a unique idea,” she says. “I’m not used to writing on a strict deadline but I have done improvisational acting, so I suppose this will be like writing and directing improv for me — something wonderful right away.”
