Validation.

To a young artist -- poet or sculptor, musician or dancer -- validation is the elusive boundary where dreams and aspirations cross over into the real world. To say you are an artist is an affirmation of hope, a design upon the future. To hear yourself called an artist is the thrill of a goal achieved, one true step forward down art’s long road.

Ellen Hagan and Alecia Whitaker are artists. They are dramatic artists and literary artists, actresses and playwrights. This is the vision they have for themselves. It is also the vision shared by the New York Fringe Festival, which has invited Hagan and Whitaker to perform their play BECOMING WOMAN at this year’s event.

The paths they have taken to New York are remarkably similar. Both women grew up in Kentucky, Whitaker amid the farms of Cynthiana, Hagan in the slightly more urban world of Bardstown. They both attended The Kentucky Center’s Governor’s School for the Arts Creative Writing program, although in different years. They each then turned from writing to the stage, entering the University of Kentucky Drama Department, where they met at last.

In the course of their acquaintance, as they compared notes on their lives and experiences, the seed of BECOMING WOMAN was planted. “The show is just about us growing up,” Whitaker said recently in an interview, and while the topics the two explore on stage can be as dramatic as adolescence itself, covering abuse, rape and the death of loved ones, they also cover such mundane but essential concerns as how young women’s bodies seem to betray them as they travel toward maturity.

“We wrote the show intently focused on 15 to 17 year old women,” Whitaker says. “The whole point of it is to give them role models.” To keep the production from becoming preachy, however, the two women have grounded it solidly in their own experiences, conveying simple truths honestly and sincerely.

As both actresses and playwrights, Whitaker and Hagan rely on exploration and experimentation to refine and develop their message. They polish scenes between performances, but are always careful to stick strictly to the script once the lights come up. “There’s a lot of trust involved that way,” according to Whitaker, and the result is not so much a work in progress as one undergoing an evolution.

With help from grants supplied by GSA and Ashland, they have managed to perform BECOMING WOMAN in schools and on stages throughout Kentucky, including at The Kentucky Center, and they are always looking for new venues to play. But Whitaker is the first to admit that the thought of taking their play to New York never seemed like a serious goal, even after Hagan moved to the Big Apple. It was she who sent in the application to appear as part of New York’s Fringe Festival, although Whitaker admits that “we never thought we’d get accepted.”

Out of more than eight hundred submissions, however, BECOMING WOMAN was among the two hundred pieces performed in New York City from August 13 to August 29. (At the time of publication, Hagan and Whitaker had yet to leave for New York. They are scheduled to perform at the Spotlight Lounge on the Pace University campus seven times over the course of the festival.)From small-town Kentucky to the lights of off- (or off-off-off-) Broadway seems like a remarkable leap, but as these two remarkable women illustrate every time they take the stage, the essence of art lies in the universal truths of human experience. And if the artist’s goal is to communicate these truths in a moving, provocative and memorable fashion, then Hagan and Whitaker are artists indeed.