AXY SENIOR PROFI LES
18-hole courses at the Mission Hills Golf Club, which today has grown to twelve 18-hole courses and hosts the World Cup of Golf. Mission Hills is near Johnson’s home in Shenzhen, China, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Located in Guangdong Province just north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen has grown from a sleepy fishing village in 1979 to a metropolis of 10 million people today. “Every time I go home
there are new buildings,” Johnson said, but he added that the changes don’t make it seem that it is not his home anymore. Rather, to him the place called home is defined by rapid change. It wouldn’t feel like home if he went back and everything was the same. Johnson came to OES in high
school because he wanted more independence and a higher quality of education than he could find in Shenzhen. He also found a vibrant intercultural experience in which he has learned important cross-cultural skills and has taught those skills to others through his work as the International Student Association representative on the Student Council. “Working with the
Intercultural Student Association has given me a better understanding of diversity,” he said.“I learned to try to find common points and see if we can make connections of any sort,” he said. “That helps build a closer relationship with one another. There is always something common that you can build upon.”
WWW.OES.EDU ALEX ASHWORTH The Playwright
a talent. For Alex Ashworth, that glimmer is in a memory of spending time in her room as a young child doing scenarios with her stuffed animals. As a young playwright, she uses human actors instead of stuffed animals to create more complex scenarios. “I’ve always
S
been interested in stories that involve relationships between people, that explore how people think and why they think what they do,” she said. Her one-act play Wonders, which was produced at OES this year, gave her a chance to work with characters tiptoeing around a terminal illness. She started writing the play as a comedy based on her own six-day bout with swine f lu, but as she worked on it and talked about it with English teacher Art Ward, she realized that she had a more serious theme to explore. “I ended up channeling a
lot of emotions I felt about the death of my friend’s father,” she said. Over the course of
ometimes it’s only in hindsight that one sees the first glimmer of
the play, the protagonist’s relationships with others help her come to accept the fact that she is dying. Working out problems through dialogue is a strategy that Alex, not just her characters, often employs. “I always want to talk out
with someone what I’m going to write,” she said. “A lot of my teachers have been willing to sit and listen to me.”
It’s really helpful having people listen to me who don’t tell me where to go with a story but help me get where I want to go.”
— Alex Ashworth
Midway through her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College, Alex will attend the conference in New York City where she will work with professional theater artists on revising Wonders. Several of the plays will be chosen for off Broadway production.
Alex submitted her play to
a festival sponsored by Young Playwrights Inc., a theater company founded by the legendary Tony, Grammy and Oscar winning composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and was one of 10 playwrights chosen from among 1600 entrants to attend a playwriting conference next year.
SUMMER 2010 OES MAGAZINE 19 19
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