Two New Plays Show How Young Minds Are Made

Two new works about pre-adolescence are running in tandem, and both argue the same thing: the tweens are not all right.

Milo Cramer's School Pictures, described as an excellent lo-fi song-cycle, and Eliya Smith's Two Girls, a verbatim play about a notorious video, examine how young minds are formed — and deformed. The two pieces share a subject: children on the edge of their teen years, under pressure.

What connects a song-cycle and a verbatim play?

Cramer works in the lo-fi register. School Pictures builds its portrait of childhood through songs, stripped down and intimate. The form matters: a song-cycle gives each child's voice room to stand alone, one small portrait at a time.

Smith takes the opposite route. Two Girls is a verbatim play — built from real words, spoken by real people — centered on a notorious video. The verbatim method puts documentary weight behind the material. The audience hears testimony, not invention.

Together, the two works reveal how young minds are made. That is the shared thesis, and both writers pursue it from different formal directions: one through music, one through documented speech.

Why tweens, and why now?

Both pieces focus on the tween years — the stretch between childhood and adolescence. It is the age when identity is assembled, often from materials the children did not choose: schools, screens, peer pressure, adult expectations.

The pairing suggests a pattern in contemporary writing for the stage. Playwrights are turning to the pre-teen years not as nostalgia but as evidence — a record of how environments shape people early.

Cramer's song-cycle and Smith's verbatim play both belong to a documentary-adjacent strain of theater. School Pictures keeps its production values deliberately low. Two Girls keeps its language deliberately real. The restraint in both cases is the point: nothing dressed up, nothing softened.

What should audiences take away?

The critical framing is clear. School Pictures earns the label "excellent." Two Girls attaches itself to a notorious video — a real artifact of contemporary culture — and turns it into testimony.

The takeaway, in plain words: these two works treat childhood as a construction site, and they show the construction in progress.

Whether the twin focus on tween distress marks a moment or a movement will become clear as more playwrights follow Cramer and Smith into this territory.