Waterford — The audience was laughing before a single line had been spoken in Amanda Rowe’s first-ever play.

Actor Aliza Sotsky lay on a bed made of hastily stacked foam pads, a pop song blaring from an iPhone as she texted furiously, unmistakable as a teenager lost in her own world. It was too familiar to the parents in the audience not to laugh, and so they did, even before the actor playing the teenager’s mother stepped on stage to interrupt.

The play’s author, an eighth-grader at Clark Lane Middle School, sat close to the stage, her eyes never leaving the actors as they spoke the lines she had first written as a school assignment, a submission to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s Young Playwrights Festival.

At intermission, Rowe, 14, was swarmed, unable to walk across the theater without stopping for a hug or a high five.

“It was amazing,” she said. She had never written a play before, she said, only acted in the drama club at Clark Lane and seen her older brother perform at Waterford High School.

Her play, "A Timepiece of Mind," was one of 186 submissions the O’Neill Center considered for this year’s festival, said Sophia Chapadjiev, the center’s education director and festival’s producer.

The festival serves both as a fast-paced training ground for young writers and as a reunion for alumni of the National Theater Institute, the O’Neill Center’s semester-long program for college students, who return to Waterford to act in and direct the festival’s creations. An additional 16 teenage playwrights whose pieces are finalists in the selection process also attend the festival and participate in creating the plays performed at the weekend's end.

The playwrights, actors, directors and backstage staff only all came together on Friday, Chapadjiev told the audience. Over a weekend of intensive writing and rehearsing, they got the plays to the stage complete with costumes, props and professional acting that made the plays seem more real than any homework assignment could.

Working with middle-and-high school students doesn’t come without its challenges: Chapadjiev said a play by Fitch High School sophomore Grace Clarke of Groton, about workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, came with a history lesson for the younger playwrights about the 1911 fire that killed 146 garment workers in the New York factory.

But reading from scripts under edit until half an hour before the show began, the actors — many of whom are working professionally in New York City theaters or studying at the country’s top drama schools — shouted and whispered the lines written for them by teenagers as if they were on a Broadway stage.

Cliff Campbell, a New York-based actor and theater teacher, played a flamboyant and insecure time traveler in Rowe’s play. He said the festival serves as a homecoming to the O’Neill Center every year, and as a way to be around young writers still new to the drama world.

“The willingness to play is there,” he said. “For many of them it’s their first experience with theater, which is so exciting.”

Dahlia Al-Habieli, a set designer and Wake Forest University professor, drew conceptual designs for the plays’ sets that were displayed in the theater during Sunday’s show. Taking direction from the playwrights, she said, is an exercise in creativity.

“They say they want the walls to be made out of Jell-O, and I’m like, 'sure,'” Al-Habieli said.

William Palmer, a seventh grader at the Williams School, drew inspiration from his middle name: Achilles.

“He was very brave,” Palmer, 13, said, reflecting on the Greek hero as he sat surrounded by an outdoor amphitheater on the O”Neill Center’s sprawling campus. “He was willing to give up his life for greatness.”

By Sunday night, Palmer's words had become a full blown production. Soraya Broukhim wailed and pouted her way through the script, the audience laughed at all the right moments and William sat in a folding chair in the dark, staring intently at his cast as they moved across the stage. At the final line, he broke into a grin.

m.shanahan@theday.com