Prizewinning play shows how Cookie crumbles

If the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition serves as the Alliance Theatre’s Research and Development Department, then its latest world premiere production, Julia Brownell’s Smart Cookie, may represent an alteration in the secret formula.

Inaugurated in 2003 and endowed by the Kendeda Foundation the following year, the program invites students of 30 graduate playwriting programs across country to submit their work. The winning play receives a full production on the Hertz Stage, finalists get high-profile staged readings, and the Alliance helps discover and cultivate some of the country’s most impressive new writers. This commitment to new work probably helped the Alliance secure its Regional Theater Tony Award in 2007.

Previous winners of the Kendeda competition have not lacked for ambition, touching on such heavyweight historical subjects as the French-Algerian War and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Plays don’t even have to win to make a splash: In 2006, Actor’s Express produced Megan Gogerty’s controversial Love Jerry, a musical with themes of pedophilia, after the play became a Kendeda finalist. To date, the reach of the plays has exceeded the grasp of several of the winners, as if the judges prefer to honor ambition and thematic breadth while excusing some clunky construction.

Smart Cookie, the fifth Kendeda winner, feels like a 180-degree turn from the others, and not just because it’s a comedy set in contemporary America. Compared to the avant-garde flourishes of last year’s In the Red and Brown Water, Smart Cookie proves almost aggressively conventional — the kind of script that could make the transition to film or television with only cosmetic re-writes. But who ever said that a sturdy narrative structure and funny one-liners were bad things?