By Anya Weerapana, Banner Staff

Rehearsing scenes from Hamlet at the age of six isn’t for everyone, but for Mina Feldman ’25, these living-room recitals were an early introduction to the theater world. “That was all my dad’s doing,” Feldman laughed as she recounted the memory. “Other than that, my parents were not big theater people. I was introduced young, but I didn’t really think of myself as a ‘theater person’ until I was in high school.” 

Feldman’s belated love story with theater is intriguing given that she’s now a playwright with two productions to her name—her first work, Course Correction, was an hour-long murder mystery set in an academic environment not dissimilar to Winsor’s and premiered in 2024, while her newest piece, the one-act Spelled Out, had its debut this January.

But Feldman’s move back into theater in Class V was somewhat of an accident: despite being more into the visual arts, Feldman, in a twist of fate, was placed in Mr. Johnson’s Acting I class. “I was not super hyped initially, but I walked out on the first day feeling like, ‘This is going to be so much fun,’” she said. “Hearing Mr. Johnson talk about acting and directing and then starting to do it was really exciting for me.” 

After progressing through Acting I, II, and eventually Directing, Feldman landed the director spot for Winsor’s annual Student Directed Play segment last winter. A new obstacle appeared: what play she wanted to direct. “When you’re thinking about what show to do at Winsor, you have to consider a lot: what are the female characters like? Are they sexist coded, or are they interesting and strong? Is the language going to come through in a way that resonates, or is the audience going to be like, ‘What is this?’ I was reading a lot of pieces and I thought, ‘Nothing’s quite right,’” recounted Feldman. And then the idea hit her: “Why don’t I just try to write something?”

Thus marked the birth of the massively successful Course Correction, and the start of Feldman’s playwright career. One year after Course Correction, Feldman returned to the stage with Spelled Out, a horror-dramedy play featuring four middle schoolers at a late-night seance and some unwelcome paranormal activity. 

When asked about the shift from writing high school characters in Course Correction to writing middle school characters in Spelled Out, Feldman cited her desire to branch out into different writing styles. She remarked,“The language [of Course Correction] was really flowery… but I feel like people have less of a filter in middle school, and what I tried to do in Spelled Out was be more economical with my writing.” On a deeper, more thematic level, Feldman said, “[T]here’s something really interesting about the fact that puberty and grief might actually be considered parallel experiences—they’re just both so intense… I feel like no one talks about what it’s like to lose somebody as a teenager.”   

Despite the developments made in her writing styles and themes, though, there remains one constant throughout Feldman’s plays: community. Aside from the audience-focused lens she likes to adopt while figuring out what to write, Feldman sees her first drafts—whether written in half a summer as Course Correction was or a single weekend in the case of Spelled Out—as constantly accounting for actor input during rehearsals. She explained, “When I’m writing a play, I’m writing it for people, for collaboration. I love seeing other kids coming into the room, reading the words out loud and giving it life.”