Playwrights
Peter Ackerman
Janet Allard. Recent works include:Vrooommm! A NASComedy (SPF 2007, published by Samuel French). Commissioned by Signature Theatre, Vrooommm! was developed at Theatreworks iand at Playlabs in Minneapolis. The Unknown: a silent musical, was developed with Page 73 and was granted an award from the Jonathan Larson Foundation. The Unknown appeared at Joe’s Pub and the New York Musical Theater Festival in 2005.Untold Crimes of Insomniacs premiered at the Guthrie Lab in April, 2004. Incognito, Loyal and Fashionistas, all Guthrie Theater Commissions are published by Playscripts, Inc. Ms. Allard is the recipient of two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. Her work has been seen at The Guthrie Lab, The Kennedy Center, Mixed Blood, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, The Yale Cabaret, Theater Row, The Women’s Project and Productions, Perseverance Theatre, The House of Candles, Access Theater in New York City and internationally in Ireland, England, Greece and New Zealand. She is a Macdowell Colony Fellow, and a Fulbright Fellow (1998 New Zealand and the South Pacific) and has taught at
Bennington College, The New School, University of Minnesota and Victoria University, New Zealand. She is a core member of the Playwrights’ Center, has attended the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU as a bookwriter/lyricist, and has an M.F.A in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. She recently worked on the Fox Television series “New Amsterdam”.
Adam Blau is a Los Angeles-based composer whose highly eclectic works have appeared in film, television and theater. A native New Yorker, Adam’s early professional forays into the world of composing included the cult favorite Monica! The Musical, a full-length musical comedy that satirically retells the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The show, produced by Page 73, played to sold-out audiences and made several runs in New York before being killed off by a vast right-wing conspiracy. Adam has assisted composer John Swihart (”How I Met Your Mother”, Napoleon Dynamite) and composer Christophe Beck (”Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, We Are Marshall). As Beck’s sole assistant, Adam orchestrated, arranged, performed, and composed for films like The Sentinel, School for Scoundrels, and Year of the Dog, among numerous others. Just as Adam set to strike out on his own, he composed a whole bunch of delightfully retro-quirky music featured in the Robin Williams comedy License to Wed. After leaving Beck’s nest, Adam (a TV junkie at heart) has steered his composing skills in the direction of television. He wrote music for ABC’s “Day Break,” the 2006 series starring Taye Diggs. He also contributed additional music to the reality show “Tori and Dean: Inn Love”, where his music was featured in nearly every episode of the show’s second season. His music has been heard on sitcoms and reality shows from CMT to CBS.
Daniel J. Blau
Andy Bragen, a graduate of Brown University’s MFA Program in Literary Arts, is the winner of the 2008 Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission. Other honors include a Jerome Fellowship, a New Voices Fellowship from Ensemble Studio Theatre, a Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and residencies at Millay Colony and Blue Mountain Center. In Spite of The Devil (formerly Spuyten Duyvil), which Andy developed at the 2004 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, will be produced by Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep. in July 2008. Greater Messapia was produced at Queens Theatre in the Park in March 2004. Also a translator, Andy works directly from French and Spanish, and with a co-translator from the Japanese. His co-translations from the Japanese have been workshopped at the last two Playlabs Conferences at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. Other plays and translations have been presented in various forms at numerous theatres in New York and elsewhere, including The Guthrie Theatre, Ars Nova, Rattlestick, LAByrinth, EST, Repertorio Español, Soho Think Tank, NYU’s hotINK Festival, The Illusion Theatre, The Aurora Theatre, and the Lark Theatre. More information is available at www.andybragen.com.
Kara Lee Corthron is a New York-based playwright. Her play Like a Cow or an Elephant was awarded the 2007 Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights and was produced at the DePaul Theatre School in Chicago. She received the 2007 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights and is a recipient of a 2008 EST/Sloan Commission. She was also the winner of the 2006 New Professional Theatre Writer’s Award, was nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, is a three-time recipient of Lincoln Center’s Lecomte du Nouy Foundation Award, and was a semi-finalist for both the Sundance Theatre Lab and Princess Grace Award. She’s been invited to several writing colonies including the Millay Colony (Leo Maitland Fellow) and the Ledig International Writer’s Retreat. Kara has developed plays with CenterStage (Baltimore), New Georges, Circle East, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Raw Impressions, the African Continuum Theatre (D.C.), Voice and Vision, and Juilliard. Her one-act, Cave Krewe, produced at Manhattan Theatre Source, will be published in Smith & Kraus’s BEST TEN-MINUTE PLAYS FOR TWO ACTORS 2007. Kara is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School. She’s a member of the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Librettist Workshop, the Dramatists Guild, ‘Wright On (co-founder), and is a New Georges Affiliated Artist.
Karen Hartman is a playwright and librettist whose current projects include GOLIATH, a drama set in the Gaza Strip (Winner of the 2008 Dorothy Silver Playwriting Prize, commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, workshops at the Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, McCarter Theater, Magic Theatre, Voice & Vision, Williamstown, and others); a contemporary female Don Juan tale entitled DONNA WANTS (A.C.T.’s First Look Festival, Theater at Boston Court); and the book for A SEA CHANGE, music and lyrics by Annmarie Milazzo. CARMEN, LA GITANA, directed by Cirque de Soleil’s Franco Dragone, with music by John Ewbank, lyrics by Annmarie Milazzo, and book co-written with Sarah Miles, will open in Madrid, September 2008. Her plays are GUM (Women’s Project, Center Stage, Magic Theater, P73, published by Theater Communications Group and Dramatists Play Service, in continuous production nationwide); GOING GONE (N.E.A. New Play Grant, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park); ANATOMY 1968 (Summer Play Festival on Theater Row); GIRL UNDER GRAIN (Best Drama in NY Fringe, extended by P73); TROY WOMEN (based on Euripides, Yale Repertory Theater/School of Drama, published by Backstage Books in Divine Fire), and LEAH’S TRAIN. Musical works include ALICE: TALES OF A CURIOUS GIRL, based on Lewis Carroll with music by Gina Leishman (AT&T Onstage Award, Dallas Theater Center, published by Playscripts, Inc.), and MOTHERBONE, an opera composed by Graham Reynolds (Loewe Award, Salvage Vanguard Theater). Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the N.E.A., the Helen Merrill Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, a Daryl Roth “Creative Spirit” Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Jerusalem. An alumna of New Dramatists, Yale University, and the Yale School of Drama, Karen has taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and many other venues, and also teaches private writing workshops.
J. Holtham’s plays include Creative Writing, 11th Hour, Race Music, Household Name, Splendid, and Daylight Savings (What Happens Now). Recent projects include: Welcome to New Jersey! (for Vital Children’s Theatre) and Lovers to Bed (with Resonance Ensemble). Upcoming: A Good Neighborhood (The Uptown Arts Stroll). His work has been seen at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Magic Theatre (SF), Clubbed Thumb, the Vital Theatre, New Dramatists, Broken Watch Theater Company and others. His new play, Manifesto, has been commissioned by Time Warner and Second Stage Theatre. Several of his plays are published by Playscripts, Inc. He is the 06-07 TCG New Generations Fellow at New Dramatists and the 2007 Resonance Ensemble Playwright-in-Residence. He is a member of E.S.T. and the Dramatists Guild and an alumnus of Youngblood. M.F.A.: The Actors Studio Drama School/New School for Social Research. He is also a proud product of the New York and New Jersey public education systems.
Michael Friedman is a founding Associate Artist of The Civilians, and has been the Composer/lyricist for the company’s productions [I Am] Nobody’s Lunch, Gone Missing, Canard, Canard, Goose? and This Beautiful City. He also wrote music and lyrics for The Brand New Kid, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, God’s Ear, and the upcoming Alice in Wonderland and Saved. His music has also been heard at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, The Roundabout Theatre Co., Second Stage, Soho Rep, Theater for a New Audience, Signature, and The Acting Company, regionally at The Kennedy Center, The Huntington Theatre Co., La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, Humana Festival, ART, Berkeley Rep, Dallas Theatre Center, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Portland Center Stage, and internationally at London’s Soho and Gate Theatres, and the Edinburgh Festival. Film work includes On Common Ground and Affair Game. He was also the dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon. He is an Artistic Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, a Princeton University Hodder Fellow, and a recipient of a MacDowell fellowship. He received a 2007 Obie award for sustained excellence.
Julia Jordan was awarded a 2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship. She is the author last year’s Dark Yellow at Studio Dante, with Elias Koteas. It was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and is being made into a feature film by Glen Luchford, starring John Hawkes and Melinda Walters. Tatjana In Color won The Francesca Primus Prize, was short-listed for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and was included in Best Plays by Women 1997. Boy at Primary Stages with T.R. Knight, was given a Susan Smith Blackburn Award honorable mention and won a Drama Desk Award for Knights portrayal of the lead character. Other plays include St. Scarlet, Nightswim and Smoking Lesson. Her plays for children includeSummer of the Swans, Guitar with music by Duncan Sheik and Walk Two Moons with music by Lucas Pappaelias. As a musical librettist she has written The Mice, which was part of Harold Princes 3HREE and Sarah, Plain and Tall which won a Kleban Award and an ATT Onstage award. She was the first librettist ever to be given a Jonathan Larson Award. She is currently working on a musical adaptation of Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which she is writing both book and lyrics. Adam Gwon is composing. Her short film The Hat premiered at Sundance and was the most played short shown on IFC in 2001-2002. She wrote the book to The Moscow Circus’s Winter Queen tour. She is a Juilliard Playwright Fellow, Manhattan Theater Club Fellow, Member of New Dramatists and the Dramatists Guild. She holds an M. Phil. in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin and teaches advanced playwriting at Barnard and Primary Stages.
Dan LeFranc is a recent graduate of the MFA playwriting program at Brown University, where he is currently in residence as the 2007-2008 John C. Russell Fellow in Playwriting. His plays have been seen or developed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Vineyard Theater, MCC, The Kennedy Center, American Repertory Theatre, ArsNova, Clubbed Thumb, Portland Center Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, The Magic Theater, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Perishable Theater, foolsFury, Kitchen Dog Theater, Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre, Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati, UCSB Summer Theater Lab, and the Page 73 Summer Residency at Yale, among others. Dan is a member of the MCC Playwrights Coalition, the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab, and teaches playwriting at the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. His short play Hippie Van Gumdrop is published in The Backstage Book of New American Short Plays 2005, edited by Craig Lucas.
Kenneth Lin’s plays have been produced, developed and/or commissioned by the Alliance Theatre, South Coast Rep, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Wilma Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Page 73, NY Stage & Film and Arena Stage. He is the winner of the Princess Grace Award, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. Lin is an alumnus of Cornell University, the U.S. Fulbright Scholarship Program and the Yale School of Drama, where he was awarded the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize for Excellence in Playwriting.
Heather Lynn MacDonald: Originally from New Hampshire, Heather has lived in New York since 1992, most recently in Harlem with her husband Anuj Shah. She is a 2008 NYSCA Individual Artist grant recipient; additional honors include a NYFA fellowship, Yaddo residency and Page 73 residency at NY Stage & Film. Plays: Expats (A.R.T. Theatre Institute, New Group [naked], Susan Smith Blackburn nominee, readings/workshops: Philadelphia Theatre Company, Naked Angels, Hangar Theater); Pink (Summer Play Festival); Waiting (Naked Angels); Retrospective (Princess Grace Award finalist); Woman With Souvenir (Atlantic Theater 453 New Works Series); Indian Point (Actor’s Theater of Louisville Heideman Award finalist) and Doughboy (2nd Annual New York International Fringe Festival). Heather has also led workshops for Barrington Stage Playwrights Mentor Project, Girl Scouts Troop 3143, Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities, and the Henry Street Settlement. Member: Naked Angels’ Mag-7. Heather holds a MFA from Columbia University where she received the Brander Matthews Fellowship, and a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Peter Morris
Dave Mowers
Dan O’Brien was recently the Hodder Fellow Playwright-in-residence at Princeton University in 2006-07. He is currently the 2008 Inaugural Carl Djerassi Distinguished Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previous productions include The Voyage of the Carcass (Stage 13 / SoHo Playhouse), The Dear Boy (Second Stage Theatre), Moving Picture (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Key West (Geva Theatre Center), Am Lit (Ensemble Studio Theatre), The Voyage of the Carcass (Page 73), and Lamarck (Perishable Theatre). He has received playwriting commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre Sloan / First Light Grant, Robyn Goodman’s Aged In Wood Productions, and residencies and fellowships from O’Neill Playwrights Conference, New Harmony Project, Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Current commissions include The House in Hydesville for Geva Theatre Center. In 2002-3, and again in 2005, Dan was the Tennessee Williams Fellow in Playwriting at The University of the South (Sewanee). Awards include the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborn Award for an emerging playwright. Dan is a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center. Visit his website at www.danobrien.org.
Kristen Palmer is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her plays have been produced by Blue Coyote Theatre (NYC), DEPARTURES and SOMETHING DECENT; OverLap Productions (NYC) and Madcap Players (Washington DC), LOCAL STORY. Her work has been presented and developed with Soho Rep, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Six Figures Theatre, Marist College, Cardboard Box Collective, the University of Idaho, Manhattan Theatre Source, Nascent Works, Gallatin Arts Festival, On the Boards, Theatre of NOTE and Printer’s Devil Theatre. Her plays include ALL THE GIRLS LOVE BOBBY KENNEDY, THE MELTING POINT, THE HEART IN YOUR CHEST, MARINA AND THE POLE, VERILEE, THE RUBY RED WRENCH, FORT BRAGG, SEATTLE/SIBERIA and SAD (co-written with Adam Szymkowicz). Kristen is a 2008/09 Jerome Fellow with the Playwrights Center, an Associated Artist of New Georges Theatre, a member of Page 73’s writers group, and alumni of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab 2006/07. She was a member of Printer’s Devil Theatre from 1998-2002. She studied Dramatic Arts at Bretton Hall College and has a MA from NYU’s Gallatin School. Currently Kristen works as a free-school teacher.
Tracie Potochnik
Scott Prendergast
Jean Randich
Shane Rettig
Mia Rovegno is the founding artistic director of HummingbirdWORKS Multimedia_Performance_Project and a company member with foolsFURY in San Francisco. She has directed and performed with The Bread and Puppet Theater, Redmoon Theater, Shadowlight Productions, Perishable Theater and Intersection for the Arts, among others. Her plays have been developed through the foolsFURY Incubator and the Page 73 Yale Summer Residency. In 2000, Mia was invited to LaMaMa ETC’s Director’s Symposium in Spoleto, Italy. In 2004, she developed Chuck Mee’s “Hotel Cassiopeia” with the SITI Company, with whom she trained intensively in Suzuki and Viewpoints. She has studied under the mentorship of Paula Vogel, Bonnie Metzgar, Anne Bogart, Mary Zimmerman, Loretta Greco, Stephen Wangh, and Curt Columbus, among others. Former adjunct faculty at New College of California’s Experimental Performance Institute, she currently teaches undergraduates at Brown. She received her BS in Performance Studies from Northwestern, and is a candidate for the MFA in Directing at the Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium.
Micah Schraft
Tommy Smith
Peggy Stafford
Victoria Stewart. Before graduating from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, Victoria was a professional stage-manager, working with David Rabe, Anne Bogart and Peter Sellars among others. She has received the Francesca Primus Award, Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, Susan Smith Blackburn Award (finalist), Norman Felton Fellowship and two Jerome Fellowships as well as residencies at Ucross/Sundance, Hedgebrook and the Donmar Warehouse. Her work has been performed and developed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, South Coast Rep, SPF, Urban Stages, Seattle Repertory Theater, Page 73, Hartford Stage, Hourglass Group, Vineyard Theatre, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, Jungle Theater, Commonweal Theater Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Eternal Spiral Project, Live Girls Productions, Overlap Productions, Guthrie Theater, and Stage Left. Her plays include LIVE GIRLS, Hardball, Leitmotif, Nightwatches, The Last Scene, 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick and an adaptation of Henry James’ The Bostonians. She is a core member of the Playwrights Center and a member of the Workhaus Collective and the Vinegar Tom Players.
Gary Sunshine ’s play The Name of Foods will be produced by the Exchange in the Spring 2008. Sweetness was produced in the Summer Play Festival (SPF); Mercury was produced at HERE in association with Eve Ensler; other recent productions include Kahn & Kant (Drama League Directors Project), Al Takes A Bride (Sydney Mardi Gras Festival) and My President (Echo Theater Company). His work has been seen/developed at the Royal National Theatre Studio, New York Stage & Film, Playwrights Horizons, NYTW’s Just Add Water Festival, Rattlestick, the New Group, the New Company (London), Underwood Theater, MCC Theater, the Actors Studio, and Rising Phoenix Rep. He has been the recipient of a NYFA fellowship and a Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. His one-act play Al Takes A Bride was published in “The Best American Short Plays of 2001” (Applause), and by Playscripts, Inc. Gary wrote, co-created, and co-produced the documentary What I Want My Words To Do To You: Voices From Inside a Women’s Maximum Security Prison (Freedom of Expression Award, Sundance Film Festival), which premiered nationwide on PBS’s “P.O.V.” He has been a writer for CBS’s “As the World Turns,” (Writers Guild Award nomination) and is currently writing a feature film for Starry Night Entertainment called Moscows. Gary, a member of the MCC Playwrights Coalition, received an A.B. from Princeton and an M.F.A. from NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program.
C. Denby Swanson is a graduate of Smith College, the National Theatre Institute, and the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers. She has been a William Inge Playwright in Residence, a Jerome Fellow and a McKnight Advancement Grant recipient. Her work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater; featured in the Southern Playwrights Festival, the Women Playwrights Project, the Estro-Genius Festival, and PlayLabs 2002; and world-premiered at Salvage Vanguard Theater, The Drilling Company, and 15 Head a Theater Lab. She is published by Smith & Kraus, Heinemann, Accompany Publishing, and Playscripts, Inc. In 2006, she was in residence at New York Stage & Film (through Page 73) to develop her play A Brief Narrative of an Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits which was also included in the Writer/Director Lab at the Playwrights Center, and workshopped at Cornell College in Iowa as part of New Plays on Campus grant. Her play Atomic Farmgirl was workshopped at the Culture Project’s Impact Festival and the first annual Icicle Creek Theater Festival, in Washington and produced by the Drilling Company in November 2007. She is a Core member of The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, an alumna of the Lark Theater in New York where her play The Death of a Cat was featured in Playwrights Week 2005, a former Artistic Director of Austin Script Works, and on the faculty at Southwestern University. Currently, she is the NEA/TCG Playwright in Residence at Zachary Theatre Center for 2007/2008, working on a new play about Austin blues club owner Clifford Antone.
Chris Talbott
Lauren Weedman
Ken Weitzman’s most recent play, The As If Body Loop, was produced as part of the 2007 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Ken returned to Humana in 2008, commissioned to write several short plays for the Humana Anthology Project, Game On. Ken’s previous plays have been presented and developed at Atlantic Theater Company, New York Stage and Film, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Arena Stage, Alliance Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Dad’s Garage, Florida Stage, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Page 73 Productions, and The Summer Play Festival. Ken has received commissions from Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, the Alliance Theatre, and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Awards include the 2003 L. Arnold Weissberger award for Arrangements (which was subsequently chosen for Atlantic Theater Company’s inaugural second stage season); the McDonald Playwriting Award for The As If Body Loop; and the Elizabeth George Commission for an Outstanding Emerging Playwright (chosen and awarded by South Coast Repertory Theatre). Ken received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and has taught playwriting at Emory University, UC San Diego, West Georgia University, The Old Globe Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Actors Express Theatre, Horizon Theatre, the Alliance Theatre, the Playwrights Project and Young Playwrights Inc. (where he was Education and Literary Director). In the fall of 2008, Ken will move from Atlanta to Indiana to teach dramatic writing at Indiana University. Ken’s acting background includes training at the University of Michigan and in New York at the Atlantic Theatre Company. He has done voice work for several books on tape, including CASINO (Simon and Schuster) by Nick Pileggi, with Ron Leibman and Joe Grifasi. Prior to playwriting Ken wrote and produced sports documentaries and narratives for the National Basketball Association Entertainment, CybrCard, Emerald City, and Speedvision.