Whenever CSUDH student and aspiring playwright Wayne Sam needs inspiration or motivation, he glances over at an old typewriter that was given to him by his late grandfather.
“He was a writer as well,” says Sam. “He really wanted me to write and pushed me forward. He promised me his old typewriter when he passed. It doesn’t work, but that’s not the point. It’s always there to remind me that there have always been people who believed in me.”
All that motivation, inspiration, and belief has led to Sam being awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award at the inaugural Nathan Louis Jackson Playwriting Awards, part of the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival. He won for his play The Pleasure of Avarice, which was completed and staged on the CSUDH campus.
Sam actually started writing the play while still attending View Park High School in South Los Angeles. The sophomore theater major brought it with him when he started as a first-year student at CSUDH, where it caught the attention of several faculty members.
Assistant theater professor Shaunte Caraballo, who worked with Sam to revise and rewrite the play, recalls, “Wayne was in a class taught by a colleague of mine, and he brought the play to me, saying, ‘This student is a playwright and I think his work is pretty good. What do you think about us producing it?’”
“I agreed, and worked with him throughout the rewrite process,” she adds. She and Sam started the revision process in Fall 2022, then spent several months planning out the production process, directing, and casting the show. It was produced at the on-campus Edison Theatre, becoming the first student-written work staged there in many years.
The Pleasure of Avarice is a unique story that begins in the 1920s, following a young Afro-Latino musician who is struggling to get his music heard. He encounters a shadowy figure who offers him infinite fame, but warns that the trade-off will be a tragic accident of some sort. The musician jumps at the chance, leading to a fantasy-fueled story that spans several decades.
“I’m really into mythology,” says Sam. “The demon is mostly based on Mammon and represents the sin of greed. The play deals with the idea of someone being so materialistic that they lose track of what’s really important in life. When he signs the wrong deal, it ends up killing someone who’s very special to him, and he has no one to blame but himself.”
“He wants to be immortal, wants all the fame and money. But in the long run, he’s like, all I have is stuff. It doesn’t have as much weight as it did.”
After helping produce the play on campus, Caraballo encouraged him to submit his work to the Kennedy Center. “He didn’t know anything about it,” she says. “But I told him that he should absolutely submit this work. I wanted him to get connected to all the other playwrights at the festival, which will open up more opportunities for him. I thought it would really help him grow as a playwright.”
When Sam found out he won the award, “I was honestly in disbelief,” he says. “I was literally getting groceries out of the car for my mom, when she asked, ‘Have you seen this email?’”
“I immediately sent it to Professor Caraballo, and asked if it was real or just a bad prank,” he recalls. “It was very surreal. The idea that I got an award for something I did was strange. I’m not great at accepting positive reinforcement sometimes, but I’m really honored and proud that I won this award.”
Sam’s ultimate goal is to be a professional playwright. Although he’s tried his hand at writing screenplays and other work, he finds the challenges of writing plays more to his liking.
“As I’ve gotten more into theater, I’ve started doing more stage plays because I feel like it’s a different kind of creativity,” he says. “Writing for the screen, you can write whatever you want, and can use special effects or anything else. Writing for the stage has to be a lot more within reason.
“So if I have an idea for what the story is going to be, I then have to think how I can actually have these people do this, within a budget, in real time. I honestly think it’s more challenging, but it’s also something that at least as I am now, I’m more capable of doing.”
During his next few years at CSUDH, Sam hopes to work on getting more student-produced works onto the Edison Theatre stage. “I want to help open doors for student work on campus,” he says. He enjoys collaborating with other students in the theater program.
“Let’s just get in there and do the work,” he says. “It’s fun to work with people who are around my same age, and we’re all pulling together and trying to do the same thing. It helps us all become more creative.”
