Kings, queens, snakes, castles and dreams came to life Saturday onstage at the Turnage Theater in Washington.

Guided by students from East Carolina University, around 13 children from Pitt County’s Belvoir Elementary School took part in the Young Playwrights Project.

In a single morning, the students dreamed up, wrote, directed and acted out their own original plays onstage for parents and other spectators.

“They’ve done some wonderful things,” said Patch Clark, an ECU instructor who presided over the workshop.

“They’ve really embraced this opportunity to write and see it come alive on the stage,” Clark added.

Funded by a BB&T Leadership Grant, the Young Playwrights Project was taken up by ECU’s College of Fine Arts & Communication, she related.

The goal of the program is to promote young people’s interest in writing and the arts, especially the art of writing plays.

Participating children had chances to work with authors of children’s books and a performance artist to explore that art, she shared.

Locally, in May, students at John Cotten Tayloe Elementary School in Washington will stage plays they’ll write at their school, according to Clark.

Scotty Henley, executive director of the Turnage Theaters Foundation, praised Clark and her ECU students for getting young people interested in the theater.

“I think it’s a wonderful program and it’s a blessing to have Patch involved with it,” Henley said.

Clark, a member of the Turnage foundation’s board, is committed to bringing children’s programming to the theater, he pointed out.

“She sees the value of the size of this theater,” Henley continued, adding that the Turnage’s relatively small stage lets students experience plays in close-up fashion.

Among Clark’s helpers was student director Bethany Bondurant, a rising ECU senior pursuing a double major in theater education and theater for youth.

Bondurant said she hopes to tour with a children’s theater company after graduation, and expects to find herself in the classroom eventually.

“This experience has been absolutely wonderful for me,” she said of Saturday’s workshop. “It’s shown me the whole other world that theater can expose children to.”

Theater education helps children develop life skills, Bondurant asserted.

Asked whether she fears live theater is a dying art, given that so many electronic distractions are competing with it, she suggested acting is life, and essentially permanent.

“We act every day,” Bondurant said, a couple of her younger student-helpers nodding their approval.