Carole Vasta Folley's plays include Pronouncing Glenn, The Family of Ewe, Alumni Pie, The Sleepover ~ A Comedy of Marriage (2015 Vermont Playwrights Award), The Seymour Sisters (state tour and development supported by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and the Vermont Community Foundation's Arts Endowment Fund), and Borrowing Time. Described as having the "storyteller gift," Vasta Folley’s plays speak to the themes of belonging and “the crazy, complicated ways we connect with one another.” Vasta Folley's column In Musing has won awards from the Vermont Press Association, the New England Newspaper & Press Association, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. She is a member of the Dramatist’s Guild.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: https://carolevf.com/ MORE ABOUT ME Writing my first script changed my life. It began while directing an uninspiring play for a local company; I was especially bothered by the lack of compelling lead roles for older women. I wanted to direct plays I wanted to see. As a storyteller by nature, playwriting had been a pipe-dream. Now it seemed a necessity. I decided to jump in to see if I could swim. I set a writing schedule and showed up to the blank page time and again. Miraculously, the story materialized as I wrote. To this day, that’s how my playwriting works. I make time to show up; I write what flows. The labor of editing follows. But, no matter, my play lives and breathes, the characters make me laugh out loud or cry. It’s a fully immersive experience that still leaves me gobsmacked. Once the play was finished, I had no idea what to do. Someone said, “You’re a director, direct it.” I was aghast. Surely I must need permission. I can’t just stage it myself, can I? Well, I did. And it was incredible. I still don’t know if staging my own work is “right” - but, many plays later, I continue to use it as an intensive workshopping tool, a powerfully effective way to see what works and fix what doesn’t. Besides, why should I let my work linger, hoping someone wants it. Life is too short to wait for another person’s yes, when I am filled with them. In closing, my first play? The workshop performances ran for three weeks and eventually sold out as word of mouth spread and audience members kept coming back. Maybe what I’m doing isn’t "how it’s done.” But what I do know, people come see my plays and I get to keep writing them. WHAT I'M WORKING ON I'm in the midst of editing my newest play, Lunch Money. It's a departure of sorts for me as it's a grittier, more somber storyline. I love my characters, as I usually do, but in this piece, I just feel quite saddened by their circumstances and sorry I can't make it better for them. Happy to say, there are seven roles, all for women, and five of them are for those over 50 and 60 years of age. KEYWORDS Lead roles for women, Women over 50, Comedy with Heart, Two-woman play, Comedy, Drama, Farce, Mother/Daughter, Belonging, Friendship, Loss, Grief, Incest, Reunion, Unconventional family, Connection, Relationships, Love A member of the Dramatists Guild and the International Centre for Women Playwrights, Jennifer Schaupp is a multidisciplinary writer, collaborative theatre artist, and educator with a feminist, darkly comedic, avant-garde, and global perspective. She has developed pieces for organizations and community events in Pittsburgh, such as Pittsburgh Fringe Festival, No Name Players' Support Women Artists Now Day, Pittsburgh Women's Scavenger Hunt & Monologue Reception, The Ellis School for young women, and Organic Theater's Earth Day Festival. For ten years, she also improvised stories with the Amish Monkeys short-form comedy troupe. Additionally, Jennifer has created work for groups and projects throughout the U.S. and beyond, including 365 Women a Year Playwriting Project (online), Gilbert Theater's New Play Festival in North Carolina, LA STAGE Alliance's National Playwrights' Slam, and Spilling Ink’s Bharatanatyam dance, poetry, and theatre production in Chennai, India.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: https://archive.pittsburghartistregistry.org/accounts/view/athena16 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-schaupp-7771227b/ MORE ABOUT ME I keep doing theatre because it's at its core human beings sharing stories, which is the most universal and primitive of acts. Theatre changes and grows with the times, but its core is still some people in a space with select people sharing and other people receiving. There is a mutual respect for what happens in that space, whatever it might be. Things can change either physically, emotionally, or spiritually, or all of the above. It may be abrupt or it may be gradual, but a change happens because of that theatrical moment between people in a designated space. WHAT I'M WORKING ON A gratitude writing workshop framed by Trauma-Informed Creative Practices KEYWORDS Dark comedy, verse, radio plays, satire, farce, immense/site-specific, historical, ritual, nature, equality, philosophy, improvisation, period, food, adaptations, biography, utopias, feminist, avant-garde, multicultural Nicole Anderson Cobb is a creative (writer for stage and screen), researcher and advocate who examines American institutions (often in crisis) and how people of color have navigated these spaces historically and contemporarily. Using the lens of examining institutions at an inflection point, Anderson Cobb has written on such moments within institutions as varied as: college campuses, funeral homes, the non-denominational church, museum cultures, early 20th century arts collectives in Charleston, South Carolina, African American sororities, gun violence in America cities and police community relations.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: https://newplayexchange.org/users/63302/nicole-anderson-cobb FB: nicole.a.cobb1 TW: sandals60617 IG: nicole.a.cobb1 MORE ABOUT ME What was your most gratifying moment in the theater? Sitting in the ETA Theater during the opening week of my play, TANGLED during it’s 12 week run in Chicago. It was a profound experience to see a play that I wrote attended by relatives, community members, extended family and written about in the local newspaper. I realized at that moment that more people would see my plays than would ever read my PhD dissertation. What play or production changed your life? When I was 5 or 6, my parents took me to a production of “The Wiz” on Broadway. We were visiting family and attending a graduation on the East Coast at Smith College…and so that show on Broadway was a part of our East Coast travels. What I learned from that experience is that African Americans expressing themselves on stage was a glorious part of the Black experience to be celebrated and supported. Unfortunately, it has taken me all this time to give myself permission to lean into this critical form of expression. But, better late than never. I feel most like myself when I …. Am spending great time in conversation with people I love experiencing art, conversation or recreation that we love. How do you overcome disappointment? Breathe, pray, process the experience with a trusted friend/therapist/spiritual counselor/…ask for feedback on areas where I can improve and try again. If you could bring one change to theater, what would it be? Where to begin…Whew… I would establish one uniform standard for theater submissions with a required notification process for accepting or declining projects.. The topsy-turvy theater submission process—with some theaters asking for just a script and email address… and others asking for essays, pages, references, bios, resumes, urine samples and vision boards, etc., OK, perhaps not the last two but you get my point. We have to establish a standard by which all theaters are asking for the same information and offering a 90-120 day notification in the most economical fashion possible. What do you want artistic directors to know? There are rich, valuable lived experiences between LA and New York…beyond city centers…beyond coasts…beyond urban areas that MUST BE welcomed, invited, called forth to the stage. What’s the one thing nobody knows about you that you’d like them to know? I. LOVE. OKRA. What is your favorite thing to do when you’re not writing? Traveling, attending cultural events, binge watching TV with my husband and daughter. Why do you keep doing theater? Theater begins impacting readers before they are ever an audience member, whether or not the plays are ever staged. Recently, I received a note from a professor looking for one of my plays (that is out of print) to assist her student working on a Master's Thesis. I was flattered and humbled and sent two copies of the play to the student. Thus, I was reminded that plays matter and writing plays matters…long after the curtain is lifted and the set is deconstructed. How do you imagine telling stories in these times? Stories must continue to be told digitally, via Zoom, across time zones, in parks and open fields, in abandoned spaces, by introducing new generations of its value, presented to folks in assisted living. WHAT I'M WORKING ON I am currently completing her first TV-pilot and working on new plays while devising work for the April-May 2022 Allerton Residency. KEYWORDS African American, Race Relations, Social Justice, Political, Intergenerational Dramedy, Global Perspectives Poet and playwright, Barbara is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Playwriting for her play Dos Madres. Her one-act plays and 10-minute plays have been given staged readings and productions by Source Theatre in Washington, DC. Barbara is the author of Theatre Mad, a collection of short comedies and Catbird, a book of poems. Mirror Talk, her memoir about working in theatre, won the IndieReader Discovery Award for Best Memoir.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: http://www.BarbaraAlfaro.net FB: https://www.facebook.com/barbara.m.alfaro TW: @BarbaraAlfaro MORE ABOUT ME I feel most myself when I'm writing comedy. I'm proud of my dramas and my poetry but writing comedy gives me the most joy. There is something so lovely in knowing I've made others smile and laugh. I enjoy being a writing mentor at the Carnegie Center in Lexington, Kentucky. WHAT I'M WORKING ON I'm working on a full-length play about finding love and losing stereotypes. KEYWORDS Comedy, Drama, Poetry Lee Roscoe’s plays have been performed from New York to Boston and Cape Cod and beyond at the Living Theatre, NYC, Boston Playwrights Theater, Provincetown Theater, and public radio stations in Boston, San Francisco and WOMR FM, which premiered The Mooncusser's Tale. Roscoe has won several prestigious grants and a few prizes and her work has been lauded by the likes of Michael Kahn (artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, DC, the late Howard Zinn, Judith Malina (founder of the Living Theatre), and playwright, David Hare. Impossible? a serious satire about American tyranny premiered virtually, at Eventide Theatre. Her themes: how our dysfunctional societal matrix affects the human heart and the planet. Her techniques are varied: realism to expressionism and beyond. A former Equity actress, Roscoe trained at HB Studio, Circle in the Square, and American Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked backstage and on stage Off-Broadway and on Cape Cod. (The Boston Globe wrote “Roscoe is brilliant” regarding her role in “The Captain’s Doll," Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and she was voted Best Performance by the Cape Cod Times numerous times.) Roscoe is also an author whose newest book Wampanoag Art for the Ages, Traditional and Transitional will be released in spring summer of 2022-- and she is a long-time journalist covering the arts, the environment, history, and more for publications local, regional and national. She is Artscope magazine's Cape Cod correspondent.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: https://www.artistsandmusicians.org/theater/lee.html Facebook: Lee Roscoe MORE ABOUT ME In a blizzard at age 13, my parents walked to Broadway from the Harvard Club. We saw Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic". I was thunderstruck. Life in real time and in the imagination, double reality, captured. I began to read every play I could get my hands on starting with Ibsen. Collecting plays for the Brearley School, starting the 1k drama library. Writing plays. Studying acting with Michael Kahn and others. I would change theater back to those days when money, carnivore capitalism's commercialism, backers' egos, were not the purpose--when producers realized that theater with meaning could be successful; when experimentation, challenges to the status quo (as in Amira Baraka's Revolutionary Theater -- don't bother to write if you are not going to challenge the status quo) changed hearts and consciousness. Before the self-referential, politically correct bullshit trivia which passes for theater now invaded the stage. WHAT I'M WORKING ON Polishing Four Plays for a Planet in Peril for online viewing supported by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, in collaboration with filmmaker producer Janet Murphy Robertson. These are lyrical, hyperbolic and love 'em or hate 'em like nothing you have ever seen before. KEYWORDS Political, Human, Nature, Environmental, Climate, Historical, Avant Garde, Tyranny, Bigotry, Mythic, Sophisticated Audiences, Defiant, Varied Styles, Original, Lyrical, Verse, Realism, Hyperbole, Multi-ethnic C.E. Wilkinson co-founded Kuku Ryku Theater Lab, an all-female professional not-for-profit experimental theater based in New York (funded by the NEA, NYSCA, et al.). With the company, original work was seen at experimental theater festivals in the US and Europe. Other plays by Wilkinson have been produced in New York, Nepal, South Africa, and Kenya. Born in New England, ex-resident of NYC and Kathmandu, Wilkinson lives on Cape Cod with her family. She knows a little Tibetan and grows historic iris--badly. Wilkinson’s style is anti-naturalistic, often making use of repetition and ritual. Her scripts are designed for actors willing to embody an unrestricted, present-centered physicality, a la Grotowski, Brook, and Mabou Mines' Joanne Akalaitis and Ruth Malaczech. She ponders seeking a revival of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Meet Sacco and Vanzetti!!! (or, Patrick Henry in Hell), a full-length dark comedy featuring 4-part chorale in the manner of Bach by Schrier-Roth & Associates, entitled "Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People." Responses to Sacco!: “If Andy Warhol and Eugene Ionesco had collaborated on an audio-visual version of American Political Tradition, they might have created something akin to C.E. Wilkinson’s hilarious new American tragedy, ‘Sacco & Vanzetti Meet Julius & Ethel Rosenberg!!!’” -- Eva Saks, Casting Call “An hysterical yet thoughtful play, unique in its conception and execution.” – Show Business Responses to Island, Briar Rose, and Going Home. “Stunning . . . an articulate madness . . . adventurous, full of risks.” -- Allan Havis, Our Town “An enlightening extension of authentic Grotowski training.” – Ted Hoffman, Alternative Theater “I thought the performance extraordinary. I don’t know when I have ever seen energy sustained at such a level of intensity or such gigantic figures on stage.” --Steven Weil, The Whitney Museum
MORE ABOUT ME Most life changing moment in theater. Life-changing? Wil Leach's LaMama ETC Company's performance at La MaMa of "The Only Jealousy of Emer" and "Reynard the Fox." WHAT I'M WORKING ON Polishing a full-length play called "Vengeance Is Mine, Sayeth Marie" and also working on a new one which is still gestating. KEYWORDS Recovered existentialist, ruthless petulant buddhist, humorless feminist psychotherapist dramatist Jill Maynard’s plays have been produced from New York to LA, where her drama CAFFEINE SOCIETY won an LA Dramalog award for Best Play. Regional production credits include I GOT SHOES, commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville and produced by Summerworks/U Mass. at Amherst; TRY THIS AT HOME (Aery Theatre Festival, Garrison, NY); and FREE SHIPPING EVERY DAY (Axial Theatre, Pleasantville, NY). Recent stage and Zoom productions include INEZ & ALICE CONSORT (Spark Creative Works, Huntington, NY); DESIGNATED DRIVER (New Deal Creative Arts, Hyde Park, NY); and GETTING BACK TO SWITZERLAND (Stage Left, Spokane, WA). A former member of The Women’s Project in New York, she’s a three-time finalist for the Heideman Award and a finalist for the FDG/CBS New Plays Award. As an actress, Jill has worked in film and TV, where she originated the role of Mavis Davis in the long-running comedy series "Doc," as well as appearing on New York and regional stages.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: http://jill-maynard.com FB: jill.maynard.188 TW: @Jill_may5 IG: @jillmaynard7109 MORE ABOUT ME I keep doing theatre because I have no choice in the matter. From a very young age, I had an abiding faith that this was what I was born to do. This faith has been sorely tried much of the time but also thrillingly rewarded often enough that I carry on. WHAT I'M WORKING ON My current obsession is playing with time and forging connections between events across different timelines, in the spirit of Tom Stoppard's ARCADIA. Julia Stewart is an author, musical book writer and lyricist. She dabbles in comedic writing. She has published ten non-fiction books, mostly on subjects related to Africa, a continent where she lived for two decades working with relief and development organizations. Her musical, called Marfa, is undergoing table reads and the song composition is underway. She has a home in Merida, Mexico, and travels frequently to New York City to take classes, eat great food, and see theater.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: https://marfamusical.com/ MORE ABOUT ME When I'm not writing, I am running, hashing (as in the hash house harriers), renovating houses, learning more Spanish, buying too much furniture, and sometimes working as an editor and writer for pay. WHAT I'M WORKING ON Marfa, the musical and TV pilots. KEYWORDS Musical, comedy, Africa, improv, sitcom, sketch comedy, cancer, Mexico, Merida, hashing Laureen Vonnegut is an American novelist, playwright and screenwriter who lives between Romania and Mexico. She also directs and produces theater and film. Her multidisciplinary work leans toward female centric stories using transgenerational characters to explore their interactions and dialogues. Common themes and subjects are characters searching for their lost identity and epiphany driven plots.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: www.lvonnegut.com FB: https://www.facebook.com/lvonnegut IG:https://www.instagram.com/laureenvonnegut/ TW:https://mobile.twitter.com/laureenvonnegut MORE ABOUT ME Years ago, I lived in London, and it was there that I discovered my love for intimate theater. I'd been to dozens of big productions and never found the connection with the actors that I had with smaller venues. To be able to see the actors and their expressions seemed to be the ultimate privilege. I felt like I was in on a secret. I let that love of intimate theater circulate in my brain until my first play, The Porcini Test which was inspired by a conversation between friends about the ultimate test of a romantic partner. What if he or she didn't know what the word porcini was? WHAT I'M WORKING ON My next theater project, 2050: THE YOLDERS is a dystopian comedy, a generational battle fueled by the insatiable quest for youth. What happens when the old become young again? When a world is destroyed by past generations’ irresponsible actions? The young band together and a clash of the ages begins… KEYWORDS Black comedy, climate, dystopia, family drama, the future, science fiction. Lee Phenner is a playwright, book writer, lyricist, and voice actor. An Oregon Shakespeare Festival Black Swan Lab writer for A Pint of Understanding (music by Joel LaRue Smith and Joseph Smith), works include the dramatic monologue Synaptic Fires produced by Brave New World Rep, screenplay Celia Now and Then (quarterfinalist, MORE Women in Film Screenplay Contest,) and the concept and text of “Circle of the First,” a choral work with music by Robert D. Terrio. Lee holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College where she received Duprey awards for screenwriting and poetry and was selected for the Ploughshares International Fiction Seminar at Kasteel Well, Netherlands. She is a member of StageSource, New Play Exchange, Honor Roll, and an associate member of the Dramatists Guild of America.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA Website: https://pintmusical.com/ Instagram: @leephenner Facebook: @lee.phenner Twitter: @leephenner LinkedIn: @leephenner MORE ABOUT ME The production that changed my life was Sunday in the Park with George (original Broadway cast). Sondheim accelerated his trajectory of weaving exceptional lyrics with inventive yet inevitable music, and with James Lapine’s book and direction, explored themes including artistic vision and “seeing" (which remains a fixation of mine), the business of art, passion and commitment, and connection in ways that still move me to tears. WHAT I'M WORKING ON A Pint of Understanding - a musical (book & lyrics) Music by Joel LaRue Smith and Joseph Smith. Summary: It’s 2012 — a pivot point, with racial tensions in America escalating and about to explode. When white police officer Tim O’Connor arrests African American scholar Chester Washington III while investigating an alleged burglary at his home, two very different stories emerge, and the media erupts. The U.S. president invites them to have a beer at the White House and tasks them with leading a national listening tour about race in America. The professor’s daughter, Chloe Washington, films the tour, and she, Tim and Chester prove to be a radioactive trio as they question their very identities and their worldviews — and their lives — are put on the line. A jazz-inspired multi-genre score drives this examination of racism, white supremacy, individual perspectives, collective blindspots — and hope. KEYWORDS political, social, social justice, racism, racial justice, equity, diverse, diversity, white supremacy, white privilege, unconscious bias, implicit bias, musical, intergenerational, lesbian, queer |
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