for her works

Derwood resident Juliana Avery is an award-winning playwright and self-described theater buff. She is also only 17 years old and a rising senior at Col. Zadok A. Magruder High School.

"It feels totally surreal, and at the same time completely natural," Avery said in reference to her recent experiences with playwriting.

Avery is slightly taken aback at the term "award-winning playwright."

"Playwright," she said. "Sort of a weird idea, but I like it."

As for any fame it might bring, she has some thoughts about that.

"I'm famous amongst the family, and that's enough," she laughed.

But award-winning she is. Avery's plays, most of which are "one acts" ranging from 10 to 20 minutes long, have won several awards and have been performed at several different venues.

The first play Avery ever wrote, "Does This Make Me Look Fat?", was written for her drama class at Magruder during her sophomore year. The one-act play was one of those chosen by Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage for a staged reading by professional actors at the annual Student Ten-Minute Play Competition.

Earlier this year, another of Avery's plays, "In the Bag," was honored at Baltimore's Center Stage during the theater's 17th Annual Young Playwrights Festival.

"In the Bag" was one of four plays chosen out of more than 300 submissions, and each of the four winning plays was read by professional actors on stage during the festival's awards night.

In addition, both theaters allowed the winning students to attend a workshop with theater professionals, which gave the students the opportunity to see a professional's perspective about their plays.

At the Center Stage festival, Avery was assigned to work with director Jim Knipple, audience services assistant with Center Stage and founding artistic director of Run of the Mill Theater, a new Baltimore-area stage pursuing nonprofit status. Since then, Avery and Knipple have kept in touch, and Avery recently finished her first full-length play, which will be produced at Run of the Mill Theater in late winter or early spring, Knipple said.

Avery also won three awards at this year's Maryland High School Theater Festival's playwriting competition, with "In the Bag" winning the Best Play award for 2002-2003, according to Magruder High School drama director Michael D'Anna.

In addition, Avery's plays have been performed at the National Invitational Theater Festival, held annually at the University of Maryland.

What makes Avery's work different from that of other playwrights her age is her maturity of writing, Knipple said.

"I think Juliana has a maturity that is actually way beyond her years," he said. "She's not very adventurous with her form, but her plays have a lot of heart, [and] really get down to the bare soul of what it means to be a human being."

Avery's plays are about everyday events and generally the characters involved are older people. Rather than focusing on teen melodrama, which doesn't really interest her, Avery said she likes to write about things in everyday life she finds interesting, the type of thing that is "really kind of extraordinary, even though it's an ordinary thing."

And, Knipple said, that's another aspect of Avery's writing that really sets it apart.

For example, in Avery's play "In the Bag," two men are outside a store's annual fire sale waiting for their wives, holding their wives' purses. The two men discuss the phenomenon of "being left with the bag," and at the end the older man explains that he's happy to be left with the bag because his wife had had a stroke the previous year and could not go to the store's sale for the first time in many years.

"It was so touching, and there was not a dry eye in the theater when it was over," Knipple said.

"She's just got this remarkable way to really latch onto that which is human in all of us," making her plays "very universal," he said.

Writing has always come naturally for the teenaged playwright.

"I always just kind of wrote as a kid. It was a source of major entertainment," Avery said.

Avery's parents were supportive of her and her writing even before they knew how skilled her writing was. A family joke is that Avery's father is her editor and Avery's mother is her agent.

"Because it's your child, you always think it's good," said Lesley Avery, Juliana's mother. "But you don't know how good ... I can see things she was doing when she was young are the foundation for now. I'm sure that will continue. Maybe she wasn't even aware of it [then], either."

Drama, on the other hand, has not always been a hobby for Avery. In contrast to her writing, she sort of "fell into drama -- like kismet," she said.

While she had shied away from drama her freshman year of high school, being overwhelmed at the amount of work required in the drama community, she started getting involved with drama her sophomore year. It was a perfect match, and "it gave me a direction for all my scribblings," she said.

After being initially cautious, Avery jumped into the drama pool headfirst, later becoming an assistant to the director, an assistant director, a stage manager and the rising treasurer of the drama club, on top of being, of course, a playwright.

"It kinda took me a while to get into [drama], but I'm in the lifestyle now," Avery said.

This past June, five of Avery's one acts were produced under the title "The Juliana Plays" as a fund-raiser for Magruder High School's drama club.

D'Anna came up with the idea and approached Avery with it, and she agreed. The club also decided to sell cookbooks that a drama student had made in order to raise money during the event. At the end of the night the club had made more than $500.

"There was so much pressure attached to 'The Juliana Plays,'" Avery said. But "it was joyous in the end" because Avery got the chance to work with some drama students she really respected, and everyone was so supportive of the event, she said.

"It was a nerve-wracking, but good, experience," Avery said.

Avery said she hopes to attend a college that would allow her to study drama and hone her writing skills. She would love to pursue what she's doing now as a career, she said.

And Knipple said she's got a good chance at being able to do that.

"She's consistently able to reach into the soul of people and say, 'Hey, this is us, let's celebrate it,'" Knipple said.

"I honestly think within the next five years you'll see her plays done in theaters," he added. "I would not be surprised to see her stuff off Broadway in the next decade."