Then the organizers called. They informed Lambert that her play, which she’d written as a sixteen-year-old high school senior, was one of ten culled from more than 1,000 works sent in by playwrights eighteen years old or younger. A later call brought even better news: Lambert’s play, which revolves around a conversation between an ice cream vendor and a hot dog vendor in New York City’s Central Park on a winter day, would be one of three plays staged this fall by the festival for a monthlong run at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan.

Lambert spent much of the fall shuttling between Providence and New York City, working out production details with director Jeremy Dobrish and attending rehearsals. Lambert says the experience was draining but exhilarating. “They treat you like you’re an actual writer rather than just a young writer,” she says.

Despite the focus on experimental theater and film at Brown, Lambert, a modern culture and media concentrator, says she wants to focus on characters and plot and to avoid the faintest whiff of snobbery: “Even saying ‘my work’ makes me feel pretentious.”