Alex Moon is a rising junior at Scituate High who loves "Hamilton" and is a self-proclaimed history and theatre nerd. This sixteen-year-old playwright has also written two plays that have been performed in the last year. I was lucky enough to meet Moon through the community arts initiative Artists from Suburbia as the assistant director of the production of his most recent play, “The Werewolves.” Before our final four-hour rehearsal last Thursday, he graciously set aside some time to speak with me.
Last summer Moon’s first play, “Eris’s Chain,” was put on by Blue River Drama at Hanover High, a program begun by theatre teacher Jacob Plummer. Plummer produced the show and Haley Ardizzoni directed it. In the following September, Corinne Mason, theatre professor and director at Massasoit College, approached Moon. He had been a student of hers at the Company Theatre in Norwell for three years, where he began as an actor, and had entrusted her with one of the very first drafts of “Eris.” When Mason was searching for an original production to put on at Massasoit the following spring, she thought Moon’s debut script would be a perfect fit. After some workshopping, the show was ready to go up in May 2016.
Whilst preparing for this performance, Moon submitted his second play, (you guessed it, "The Werewolves!") to Artists from Suburbia and won the contest to have the script performed in a staged reading. While “Eris” spoke to Moon’s affinity for Greek mythology, “Werewolves” honed in on his fascination with factual history. Upon doing some digging in the archives of World War II Hitler Youth, Moon discovered the story he was compelled to tell. In “Werewolves,” he crafts a narrative of thirteen boys his own age and younger who were drafted to serve Nazi Germany in the special operations Hitlerjugend team termed the Werewolves. Throughout their journey, these boy-soldiers are faced with the necessity of perpetuating the violence that has been forced them. The central themes of nationalism, the pressure to become an adult in the midst of one’s youthful prime and, not to mention, the throws of raging teenage hormones make for an extremely engaging and thought-provoking hour-and-a-half-long spectacle.
Moon confronts some of the most quintessential topics of the human experience in his writing; he, in fact, does not write about anything unless he deems it to be worthwhile. “There’s a lesson to be learned,” Moon shared with me “about the price of violence and what that does to not just individuals but to a society”. In the case of “Werewolves,” this moment in history “already had a message built into it.”
Moon told me about the influence contemporary playwrights such as Sarah Kane had on him, whose graphically sexual and violent work shocked audiences in the ‘90s. Her gritty style, in which violence is not present simply for the sake of violence, but serves a purpose, is one Moon emulates in “Werewolves”. His minimalist styling in this work makes it difficult for the audience to completely identify with any of these characters. They are not archetypes; they are complex, with their worst vices blatantly exposed. One day after rehearsal, Mason called attention to the additional presence of Brechtian style in Moon's play, that which relies on the audience's reflective detachment. Brecht was a German playwright Moon may not have consciously realized was influencing his writing.
Kane and Brecht, however, were not the first writers Moon had ever read. Long before this point he --like most other children of this century -- ate up those “Harry Potter” books. But Moon went further than most kids in his level of literary exploration. At the age of thirteen he read “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” and was fascinated by the epic lore. Around that same time, he began to get his feet wet writing short stories and novels (which he claims were no good, but I have a hard time completely believing that).
For someone who never found school particularly challenging, Moon hasn't had much trouble in figuring out a system in which he can balance schoolwork and writing creatively: it is all about prioritizing. He shared with me:
“I like learning and I like finding out about the world… but for the past two or three years now I’ve had an idea about the directions I want to go in the terms of a career and who I want to be as a person, and I think that once you have an idea of that, school can be kind of stifling. I appreciate a lot of what we’re doing and I see the real-world application of it... but at the same time, if I can spend 70 percent of class with my face in a notebook writing a play, and then I only have to participate that 30 percent to get a good grade in that class, that’s what I’m going to do because I feel like I’m doing what I have to for school, but I still have a lot of time to do what I want to.”
Moon is continuing toward a career in playwriting. At this point, like any theatre kid, he aspires to go to what he refers to the “Emerald City” of New York after high school. He has looked into both NYU and Columbia, but is keeping his options open. Later this summer, he has plans to attend an acting camp at Yale, another of his top schools. Moon is a young man with a clear vision of the path ahead of him. He imparts, “I see what I want and at this point I know that I can have it as a high schooler, so I’m going to keep pushing myself to do that.”
What is the next project on Moon’s hands, you might ask? Luckily, Moon gave me some details on a World War I musical comedy (yes, folks, we’re moving further back in time on this one) that he and his friend, Nick Alessi, have been crafting together. They have completed the book for what they have titled “Great, War.” Moon, it seems, just can’t stop writing about war. But with good reason; he explained to me that in learning about WWI in school, it was “a lot to take in: the scale of human death and suffering. It was almost ridiculous to see how willingly people would waste human life”. Being a huge Monty Python fan, he saw the opportunity to make a statement about the absurdity of violence with his clever and dry sense of humour. “Violence is stupid" Moon stated, "war is stupid”. It is as simple as that. By presenting this perspective to his audience, Moon hopes to push them to stop and reevaluate their own beliefs.
“You have two hours and twenty minutes to convince people that whatever you’re doing is important and it’s beautiful and it’s bettering our society as a whole” Moon states. This, he has certainly already done. Those of us following Alex Moon's career cannot wait to see what he does next.
