Van Allen’s own playwrights McCormick, Novak to have their play, ‘The Wi-Fi Trauma’ performed across state

Olivia McCormick and Lauren Novak may be in fifth grade, but they're already having one of their plays performed across the state.

The two are winners in Old Creamery Theatre's Kids Writing Contest where students in first through sixth grade are able to enter poems, stories, songs or plays of their own creation.

Van Allen teacher Joni Manning required everyone in her class to write something for the contest, but only a handful of students decided to submit work for consideration.

'Mrs. Manning told us about it and we were like, ‘Wow, that's cool, we should try it,'” Novak said.

So she and McCormick partnered up and spent two weeks working on their play: 'The Wi-Fi Trauma.”

'Last year when they submitted (their play), it was after the contest had officially closed for that school year,” said Manning, the pair's fourth-grade teacher. 'But the judge read their story and said ‘This is really funny, would you please tweak it to fit the new guidelines and resubmit it.'”

Now their script is one of seven pieces being performed by the Old Creamery Theatre Group.

'(The play's) about two girls name Felecia and Becky,” said Novak. 'And they're having a really hard time getting away from their phones and technology.”

The play focuses on the importance of family, community and getting off the Internet frequently. According to Novak, being on digital devices or the Internet too much is 'a really big problem with today.”

'(A lot of people are) stuck on their phones and technology,” McCormick said, 'and not really paying attention to the real world.”

The girls also wrote three parody songs for the show. One of these was a recent addition partially incorporated to better fit the country theme of the contest this year: The Jon Pardi song 'Dirt on My Boots” re-imagined as 'Hole in My Purse” performed while Becky and Felecia are online shopping.

McCormick and Novak have experience with music, which helped them be more equipped for writing spoof songs. Both are in the school's band, where McCormick plays trumpet, Novak the clarinet. McCormick has also acted before and is in honor band.

Their writing process was very collaborative. Rather than writing their own separate pages, they would meet in person or work together over Google Docs.

'We would just basically spill out ideas together and pick the ones we liked the most,” McCormick said. 'We tried to make it very funny and apparently that worked.”

It worked well enough that not only were they one of the top seven scripts the Old Creamery Theatre received, but were also selected by their teachers to go to Oskaloosa for a writers conference held at William Penn University in March.

'Each grade can send as many as four students,” Manning said. 'It's just a whole day focused on writing. They were selected by their teachers as writers who would benefit from going beyond what we teach here in school.”

Novak and McCormick haven't seen the live show yet, but they hope what they wrote on the page shows up in the show the way they picture it. They want to see Becky and Felecia as Valley Girls like they imagined them and that the parody songs have the right rhythm.

'If they don't perform ‘Wi-Fi Oh, No No,' I will be sad,” said Novak, referring to the parody song she and McCormick enjoyed writing the most. 'While we were going along we would kind of act it out. But not as much as (the full show).”

The girls will get to see it with the rest of their school when the Old Creamery Theatre will put on the production at Van Allen March 1, at 2 p.m. The pair will also be recognized for their excellent script with a certificate from Old Creamery.