Balancing school, work and other interests is not an easy task, but Ohio University student Alaina Tennant found her stride. Despite her schedule, she found time for her passion for playwriting by doing a majority of her writing in the car during long road trips.
Her writing on the road paid off, with Tennant winning a WSU-based competition for her work. And now, she’s bringing one of her plays to a Wichita theater.
Tennant, a native of Akron, Ohio, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in playwriting, won the 2025 Bela Kiralyfalvi National Student Playwriting Competition — a contest created by former theater professor and director of the school of performing arts Bela Kiralyfalvi and later named in his honor — for her full-length play, “Now we are one hundred.”
Tennant’s playwriting journey began long before high school.
“I was kind of interested in screenwriting,” Tennant said. “We make a joke in my family because my mom posted on Facebook when I was four. There was a picture of me, and it’s labeled ‘writing her first script.’”
As she grew older, Tennant said she began to realize screenwriting wasn’t for her, but developed and shifted her passion for writing to a different form.
“I’ve always done script writing, but I didn’t start playwriting until high school,” Tennant said. “I’d just always been really involved with theater, and I was feeling like the film industry was maybe not the place I wanted to be.”
“Now we are a hundred” is inspired by the rocky relationship between A.A. Milne, the creator of “Winnie-the-Pooh,” and his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Tennant said she spent a lot of her time researching the Milnes and reading all of Christopher Robin Milne’s autobiographies.
This isn’t the first time Tennant said she has researched a project extensively — in fact, almost all of her projects are based on historical aspects.
“I really try to do all the research beforehand, and that way I can layer it into a story,” Tennant said. “Almost always they’re grounded in history. My friends joke that they’re always about war, which is not true, but I suppose, if you want to look at it that way.”
When Tennant first finished the script for “Now we are a hundred,” she said she told herself it was “a really bad script” and that she should “put it away.”
“I don’t know why I told myself that, but in my head, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s so many problems with it. Everything’s so, like, tangled, and it doesn’t make any sense,’” Tennant said.
Instead of “putting away” her play, she entered it in the Bela Kiralyfalvi competition. Despite Tennant’s original doubts about the script, a year later, she received an email saying she had won. Tennant said she was surprised and realized she hadn’t read the script since she’d submitted it.
“I was like, ‘Oh crap, I should go read that script, because I think it’s really bad,’” Tennant said. “And I hopped on, and it was not a bad script. And I was like, ‘Oh, wait, okay. Wait, no, this is good. We’re all right.’ So, first feeling was confusion, and then fear, and then I was like, ‘Oh, wait, no, this is, this is good, this is fun.’”
As part of her reward, “Now we are a hundred” is being shown during Wichita State’s 2025 theater season and is being directed by alumna Jane Gabbert. Tennant said that she’s directed her own work before, but found she doesn’t enjoy it as much as playwriting.
“I would much rather sit in the playwright seat during the collaborative process and let somebody else just really make it their own,” Tenant said.
Tennant will be at the showings for “Now we are a hundred,” which runs from Sept. 25-27 at 7:30 p.m., at Welsbacher Theater, 5015 E 29th St N, Wichita, KS.
Tennant said seeing her work come to life is “terrifying,” but she is excited to see it in person.
“A lot of the times when I’m collaborating, I’m working with other students at my school, or like a theater that I’m physically in,” Tennant said. “So I think it’s much more realistic to have to do it over the phone, not exactly knowing what everything is going on and just placing a lot of trust on Jane, and on the school.”
