 I'm losing my voice, which is a wonderful thing to do today. But luckily we have a baker's dozen of people with nice voices telling us good stories about good stories. This is playwrights under the radar, the idea of which grew out of the frustration I have. I'm a dramaturg and literary manager in the theater in southwestern Norway. Thank you. And I like to try to follow American theater, being an American expatriate. I read The New York Times and that worked out fine for a great number of years because just about any good play in the U.S. wound up in New York and that was sort of the point of producing a play in San Francisco, for example, where I come from, is you really wanted it to get to New York because that's where you could start making money then it would be distributed to all the other cities in the U.S. That was the way it worked then. Now it doesn't work that way, it works in a different way. There's more regionalization. This is thanks to the growth of the regional theater movement, basically, where you can find very good playwrights writing tremendously good plays who never bother about New York. I mean, if somebody wants to set up to produce their play off-Broadway, that's certainly fine, but that's not the goal. The goal is to have this regional feeling in a sense. So here I really hope to be able to hear about plays that are as good as those being done in New York, but are typically New York plays, basically, because the New York plays are kind of typical, there's certain standards and genre elements that you have in New York plays that you don't necessarily have in plays from Michigan or Iowa. So, we start off with Catherine Balachy, who is affiliated with the Great Canadian Theatre Company. She'll be talking about a playwright I have never heard of, and that's why I'm here to hear about him called Behavior. So like Michael said, Catherine Balachy, I'm from the Great Canadian Theatre Company, or the GCTC in Ottawa. There, I'm the Education Services Manager, as well as the Artist Liaison, so I have the immense pleasure of coordinating the Playwrights Network there. And I'm going to talk about one of our playwrights, Dara Title, because we're producing her show next season. It's called Behavior. So I'm going to read a section of her bio because she says it really well, and then I'll go into kind of her relationship with the GCTC. So, Dara's career as a theatre maker has always focused on issues of gender, justice, sexuality, and politics. Her work is as rebellious and radical as it is entertaining and humorous. She is as much a socialist feminist activist as she is a respected and contributing theatre professional. After graduating from the National Theatre School in playwriting, she had three successful productions. You Like It in 2006, and it's a collective creation committed to querying and trans-focused adaptation of As You Like It. Marla's Party is a feminist family drama that looks at female depression and religious extremism, and the Apology. And the Apology was her first major success with the Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary. And it's about the romantic poets and their experiments with polyamory and feminism. So her newest play, Behavior, will be produced with us, the GCTC, in our upcoming season. And her unrelentingly intellectual and probing plays habitually attacking misogyny and capitalism with a wide open heart and a sympathy for the full character she creates, which are often full of shame and failing hilariously. Now, I like that, I mean it was a bio written for a grant, so you can kind of hear that a little bit there. But I think it really gets the nail on the head and why she works really well for the GCTC, because she has this fascinating artistic career, but then this parallel activist career. So in her political career, she worked for the NDP, the New Democratic Party here in Canada. And she now works for Action Canada for Sexual Health. So she, you know, advocates for abortion rights, all sorts of things across the country. And so she kind of has this parallel career that works really well for us, because we have our political roots at the GCTC, being in the nation's capital, of course. Because we were founded by political science professors at Carleton University, so we like to keep all that together. And she also for us, she represents a very rare arc that we have seen, where we started by funding her with a recommender grant through the Ontario Arts Council. And then we bumped her up to our playwright residence and she's in our playwright's network. And now we're producing her. I mean, for a theatre company that doesn't always commission new work, it's so satisfying to see that come full circle. So one more minute. Okay. So I just like to talk about her work, because it works really well in our nation's capital and across the country. And oh, the behavior will also be produced. It's co-produced with Spiderweb Show, who we'll be hearing from tomorrow, as I understand it. So, work on Saturday. That's a Saturday. But other than that, Dara's great. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. Next up is Elana Brownstein. Oh, very good. Ta-da. Ta-da. Here I come. Hi, everybody. My name is Elana Brownstein. You see her, hers pronouns. And I am the director of New Work at Company One Theatre in Boston. And I'm here to tell you about a play called Leftovers by Josh Wilder. Josh is a recent graduate. He just graduated this year from the MFA Playwriting Program at the Yale School of Drama and studied under Charelle Alvin McRaney and Sarah Rule, among many others. He is originally from Philly, where this play Leftovers is set. He is a... That's right. Yeah, Philly. He is a former Jerome Fellow, a Many Voices Fellow. He's participated in Sundance at U-Cross. He's been in residence at the Royal Court. Plarratt Center, he's got a commission from OSF as part of their Play On series. And the thing to know about Josh Wilder is that he primarily writes for people who don't regularly attend the theater. People whose stories aren't... They feel are welcome in most theaters and they don't often see themselves on stage. He writes primarily for black and brown audiences urban audiences and his plays are populated with those stories in ways that are really illuminating and compelling. This play Leftovers marries fables and myths with hero stories and pop culture and the challenges of urban poverty and gentrification. The story unfolds as two brothers discover a gigantic Jack in the Beanstalk-style dandelion that sort of emerges from the sidewalk outside their house. And they have to go on a quest in order to reunify their family and move beyond a search for what they call Cosby Show happiness. And yes, Cliff Huckstable is actually a character in this play. He is an embodiment of respectable black fatherhood and the center of pop culture's story of upper middle class black family achievement. But what happens if your family doesn't align with that narrative? And what do we do about the gap between public personas and personal failings? Company One Theater has been developing this play for two years and will premiere next month at the Strand Theater in the Uppams Corner area of Dorchester in Boston. All performances are pay what you wish. This play sits at the center of robust community engagement programming, working within the Uppams Corner neighborhood not at that neighborhood but in the neighborhood. And that area faces a lot of the same issues that South Philly does, which is what this play is set. They have a handout to tell you more about all the details, how much time do I have? Great, I've got one minute, perfect. I wanted to tell you about why we are producing the play and why I think you should produce the play. Company One is producing leftovers as a way to address the historical and systemic inequities that have led to today's cycle of poverty. We're amplifying forgiveness and the dangers of perpetuating the absence black father myth. We're doing it to amplify the power to dream, wish and be the hero of your own journey is not reserved solely for white people. The vital role that organizations locally can have in combating gentrification and revitalizing communities from within, and we're promoting a yes we can for black and brown young men in a world that says no you can't. So if you want to read that play and you think you should produce it, I think you should produce it. Come find me and I will happily give you one of my beautiful full-color handouts. Next up is Julia Bumpke, freelance often affiliated with Opera Philadelphia. Hi everybody, so as Michael mentioned I'm Julia Bumpke, I'm based in Philly and I'm here to talk today about Kate Tarper. And the piece that I brought is my program, not April, close on it. So we're already off to a great start. So I'm here to talk about Kate Tarper. Kate Tarper's unique brand of physical, absurdist and deeply theatrical playwriting draws on visual arts, meticulous research and a penetrating observational eye to create pieces that are rooted in the body's power. Hermione plays rebel in experimentation with form and informs relationship with physicality awfully often in a staunchly non-linear way. Tarper has a rich creative background that began with training in visual arts at Interlochen Arts Academy. And during a gap year before college she embarked on a year-long arts residency in the Republic of the Congo where she was transformed by how she heard language being used as an instrument of power. She began keeping a detailed journal of the conflicts that she saw and heard during this formative year. And by the end of the project she felt that her ear was forever changed. When she returned to America she was eager to write and she had a very strong ear for dialogue. At Reed College and eventually at Yale School of Drama her experiences in the Congo fueled a long-term fascination with the politics of power, race and class within hierarchies. Often Tarper juxtaposes disparate concepts in her texts like war, media and clowning. The mix that prompted her play Thunderbodies. And these combinations result in pieces that are as piercingly insightful as they are funny. With Kate Tarper the American Theater at long last has a woman comedic anarchist. Praised playwright Paula Vogel adding, I am taking moments of Thunderbodies with me to my deathbed so I have a last belly laugh before the last breath. Tarper is also interested in how face-simpsons lucid body technique helps performers break out of their physical habits. Experimenting with how to use their bodies in non-naturalistic ensemble driven ways. I like starting a play with too many ideas she describes so that they can cross-pollinate in a weird combination of ways. This approach requires a large amount of research up front. For Thunderbodies, Tarper used literary theory, journalistic accounts of recent war experiences and movement-based clown techniques to jump-start her writing process. Drawing upon her visual arts roots she also often uses artwork to help explore concepts for a piece before she even starts writing. In her play Laura and the Sea Tarper's playing space is equal parts mundane office and boatscape a place where realities bend and overlap. Laura, a middle-aged travel agent recently committed suicide while on a company boating outing and her coworkers have started a memorial site in her honor. As time passes her coworkers memories become refracted. They can't quite tell what they knew of her and invented what they projected onto her and what was true. The blog billows on stage like a sailboat capturing their sunny memories of Laura's final hours even as it reveals the superficiality of their relationships with her when she was alive. In her life she was an acquaintance to most and an ex-lover to one but in death she becomes a vessel for her coworkers to express their rawest fears and losses. Through it all Tarper employs physicality as a storytelling tool. The primary differences between being on a boat and working in an office are how you hold your body how where you are with your toes and where you locate the horizon she writes at the top of the play. This specificity gives the play an energy of cautious optimism which makes the desperation all the more powerful. Laura in the sea is both slightly funny and quietly devastating balancing its light and its darkness to a electrifying event. Great. It's an understated play there is never a dramatic denouement for Laura's death and this allowed its delicate mood to simmer without ever becoming modlin. The blog can see deftly captures each co-worker revealing their personalities in ways that are equal parts humorous and heartbreaking. Reason years have been a turning point for Tarper's career. In 2016 Laura in the sea received coveted National Playwrights Conference spot at the O'Neill and Thunderbodies is receiving its professional premiere this upcoming season for the Willam Theater in Philly for their resident company called Dionysus was such a nice man up until this point she's received prestigious workshops but few productions. This is really her first year of getting professionally produced outside of an academic setting and she only quit her day job as a paralegal in early 2016 so this is really the moment that she's taking off and overall I feel that she's a writer of truly enormous promise and one whose ensemble driven work should be shared widely. Thank you. That certainly sounds like a playwright who's just still under the radar but it's going to be tomorrow morning so we'll see. I'm going to be ordering a few of the plays I think. Next up is Adrian Centano talking about Boney de Alves. Adrian is with Playwrights Arena in Los Angeles where he's been a role matured as a literary manager for 10 years? 15 years? Okay. Boney de Alves is a queer Filipino-American playwright and actor based out of Los Angeles. He's one of the most prolific playwrights in the LA New Works scene currently having four plays produced at four different companies in the past year alone. His work aims to highlight the importance of inclusion for Filipinos and Filipino-Americans often examining the way in which Filipino-American identity and queerness intersect and particularly how those two identities clash against the myth of the American dream. In Ruby, tragically rotund, plus-sized teen Ruby Salazar is shattered when her mother Edwina uses Ruby's university tuition money to fund younger sister Jimmelin's blossoming beauty pageant career. With the encouragement of her sexy and supportive boyfriend Lamont and a trio of chorus like best friends, Ruby signs up for the pageant determined to prove her worth to Edwina once and for all. Fixed, inspired loosely by Calderon's Spanish Golden Age drama The Physician of His Own Honor follows Miracles Malacanam, the top-earning masseuse at a happy-ending massage parlor in historic Filipino town Los Angeles. Miracles pines after bad boy Mariano, brother to a surging local politician who visits her in the cover of night and laments that their relationship would quote, be easier if. The unspoken being Miracles' recently rejected request for gender reassignment surgery. But the play I'm supposed to talk about today is Bloodletting, a finalist for the Penn Center USA Literary Award and recently remounted by center theater group alongside playwright Serena for Block Party 2018 at the Kirk Douglas. Bloodletting follows two Filipino-American siblings, domineering older sister Farrah and weak-willed younger brother Bosley as they return to the Philippines to fulfill their father's dying wish to have his ashes scattered in the Puerto Princesa Underground River. The two arrive by chartered plane and seeking refuge from a storm in-depth at the Princess Cafe, a nipah hut owned and operated by Jemri Flores and his granddaughter Lily. Jemri reluctantly agrees to shelter the siblings at his granddaughter's insistence and the foreign gauge in a conversation that reveals one of them to be an aswan, a creature from Filipino folklore straddling the border between witch and vampire. As the night progresses so do the supernatural happenings at the Princess Cafe. Using the supernatural as a stand-in for familial emotional manipulation and abuse, Alvarez crafts a haunting, tragic and at time surprisingly funny story about the weight of that which is said or left unsaid and how those words resonate long after our loved ones have left us. There is perhaps no better example of this than a small moment that provokes two distinct reactions. When revisiting the topic of their father's final days, Bosley becomes a sobbing wreck consumed by the loss not only of his father but the loss of an opportunity for reconciliation that could have been. Farah, the hard-nosed stoic and the favored child of the family insists that he stop his whining. When Bosley is unable to turn off his tears, Farah currently demands that he quote, feel less. And with each passing jab Farah gives to Bosley, Bosley rides in pain, the pointed metaphysical realization of their shared pain by this magical realism. But Alvarez plays always demand that we feel more. They invite us to feel bigger and deeper than when we arrived at the theater and for that I think they are a wonderful contribution to the American theater. Thank you very much. Thank you Adrian. Next we have Amanda Dawson who teaches at Brescia University in Kentucky. Close, Brescia. Not Russia, but Brescia. Yes, Amanda. She, her, yes, I'm a professor of freelance dramaturg and associate VP of communications for LMDA and I am super thrilled to share with you a playwright that is ready to be and needed on your radar Terence Arbel Chisolm. To give you a quick glimpse of him before I dive into his work this is a recent Facebook post for May 22 that he wrote. He writes, in the past 12 days I finished a commission I secured two new productions I had a reading of a new play with 27 black actors I presented a new short play with a black theater collective I made a list of dope plays alongside a bunch of dope playwrights I won a best new play award I had a reading of another new play I got a new commission I graduated from college for the third time and I presented another new short play with another black theater collective but I personally met Terence and he did graduate from Juilliard and won the Smith Prize He's getting his work produced all over the country and has written numerous plays seven of which are available to download on the new play Exchange and the play that introduced me to Terence's work and also made me fall in love with his writing is a play called Brear Cotton so B-R, Kostrophe-E-R Cotton. Terence is from St. Louis and actually attended the same high school as Michael Brown at the time of Brown's murder in Ferguson Terence was in Washington, D.C. attending school and according to one article he was frustrated that he wasn't in St. Louis so he put his quote rage into this play It has a cast of five and is a dark comedy drama set in Lynchburg, Virginia Here's the brief synopsis for it The former site of a thriving Cotton Mill is now an impoverished neighborhood deeply affected by all the recent killings of young black men like himself, Ruffarino a 14-year-old militant incites riots at school and online more and more at odds with his mother and grandfather the boys' anger grows beyond containment while the family home literally sinks into the Cotton field and no one seems to notice but him and this play was an NNPN rolling world premiere this past season a little bit more about who he is his artistic statement on NPX which I think tells a lot about his writing I write plays that span space time and multiple universes where memories lecture elephants sing and cotton fields grow in kitchens I write plays where 14-year-old black boys wake up with blonde hair and blue eyes I write plays where scenes stutter stop and then restart again I write plays for the theater I'm interested in theatricality for theatricality's sake By this I mean I write plays that are required to live on stage I'm really thinking about my audience as I write how to move them, manipulate them make them uncomfortable and at once never forget that they are watching a thing that is unique and that can only ever happen one time I write plays that explore form break conventional practices of theater making since beginning the MFA which he recently finished I've been very inspired by classic theater and dramatic theory in so much as I want to subvert it I write plays with their own inherent structure and dramaturgy I write plays about my experience I'm a black man from St. Louis I'm a black man in the United States of America I write plays that explore themes of race and representation and those themes are present in all of my work so you can follow him on twitter at theaterthirsty theaterareat and I would encourage you to look at his play rear cotton on NPX as well as another play hood or being black for dummies which is also about two 14-year-old boys one who writes a manual about being black for dummies and another play called black lady at the wordy set in 2020 where three women devise a revolution to put the women in charge so please check out Terence Arbel Chesum thought just occurred to me and that is that I work with a lot of Norwegian playwrights but getting Norwegian playwrights to write about something current like the killing of black men as we heard about in that play is very very difficult I don't know why it astounds me that it's so very difficult Norwegian playwrights tend to turn away from current events that's part of the problem with Norwegian theater if you ask me next up we have Jacqueline Goldfinger who is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches playwriting and with play pen in Pennsylvania let's get sorry you're on the wrong list no no we take Jacqueline I'll do you next I'm sorry I'm sorry Cliff you're I I think I'm an alien what wait I thought we were here for you to tell me you were pregnant no what that's crazy I think I'm an alien and that is how Emma Boydell the gap begins it's a story between two sisters it's a story about family but it explodes what we think of as the traditional American family narrative to talk about issues of queerness and identity and otherness using the metaphor of one sister being an alien to discover what it's like to be the other to discover the other in yourself even though it feels unknown to you and how do you make the journey to yourself once you realize who you really are and decide to embrace it again it's called the gap by Emma Boydell it's on the new play exchange I met Emma five years ago when she moved to Philadelphia she just finished her degree at Barnard we took her into our emerging playwrights group called The Foundry which is located at play pen in Philadelphia the past five years in Philadelphia she's developed her work with Michael Hollinger when Eli and I and the gap was just produced at Zucca Theater in Philadelphia she was recently invited to be a fellow at the playwrights realm she's been in the arts noble play group she's found a lot of success in kind of those undercurrent development groups around the northeast and so she recently moved to New York to taking the next step in her career but she has not unfortunately found a second production for the gap so I'm here to encourage folks to check out her work and the gap knowing that she is looking for a second production what I love about Emma's work is that it is funny it is heartfelt it is thoughtful it pushes the boundary of craft but uses humor to invite people in so often when playwrights try and push against the boundaries of traditional theater audiences feel alienated but because she so beautifully balances the humor which the push they feel welcome in to go on a journey they may otherwise be willing to go on which is really exciting Emma describes herself as a writer and creative producer dedicated to global stories from the queer margins of dominant culture and while she was in Philadelphia she not only participated in developing numerous plays in the foundry but she also co-founded Orbiter 3 which is our local playwrights producing group and one of the great things about working with Emma is not only is she just a wonderful person and talented writer but because she's been a producer she understands what that means and so she's incredibly easy to work with in a producing capacity which is a joy um um the Philadelphia Inquirer described the gap as a powerfully contemporary and profoundly female dark comedy about trauma, art and sisterhood that asks what's worse for getting or remembering and the way that Emma describes the play her synopsis is Nicole tells her sister Lee that she was abducted by aliens Lee goes on a performance art journey to figure out why the gap brings them both closer to articulating the truth about a strange moment and their childhood that neither can name but has changed them both for the rest of their lives um and I'm going to be honest I typically don't like theater about art I don't like art about art I feel like it's done so much that there is very little new space in which to tread um and so when Emma first brought pages of the gap into the foundry like outside I was like wonderful let's read your new pages holy fuck it's another young artist writing about making art no it's going to be great it's going to be fine right so I had that initial response but what was wonderful is that she completely the performing art was just something that was a conduit for her sister to understand herself and so the art making was really intrinsically engaging with the story rather than being this put on young artist thing so I hope that you will check it out again it's called The Gap by Emma Boydell she has a website emmaboydell.com and she's on the new play exchange thank you so much thank you Jackie Jackie has said something very interesting that she's looking for a second production that's often the second production that really teaches the playwright what it is we do we had a young playwright who had several plays produced just once in the country and then we were the first theater to do one of his Oslo plays outside of Oslo and he came to us at the premiere party and said this is really where I learned what theater is is seeing production number two production number one I didn't really understand but when you see two so one plus one is more than two it's actually three okay next up we should have been up before as Claire Hadley so that we broke with the imaginative alphabetical and Claire works at the Midland Center for the Arts and the Midlands Center for the Arts is in Michigan something I didn't know which is a freelance thank you so hi I'm Claire Hadley from Midland Michigan so I was really glad that this year we were in Toronto because I could drive here which was a little better and I'll be talking about Claire Francis Sullivan no relation and she is a New York City based performer composer lyricist and playwright so she kind of does it all and understands working from both sides of the table she's originally from Michigan very close to me she graduated from Central Michigan University which is where I'm currently getting my masters so we kind of share that and she started off in the musical theater program there and she produced her first song cycle when she was a sophomore wrote it and produced it at that venue and since then has written several short plays and a lot of music while she was still at university and she finished her first full length musical by the time she graduated she was off to a really good start she then went and studied at the powerhouse theater training company in Poughkeepsie so she made the jump right away to New York let's get out of Michigan I feel and so she was working as a playwriting apprentice there and getting some more experience under her belt since being in New York she had her first short play Close Encounters produced in Michigan and in London you know close neighbors there and when it was in London it was produced at the Telos Science Fiction Theater Festival which I think is fascinating and she was just commissioned to produce a brand new version of the Christmas Carol who hasn't seen a million new versions of that but this one I think is really interesting and I might be a little bit biased because I happen to be the dramaturg on the project but it's a modern adaptation I mean like this year happening right now adaptation of the original Dickens story the poster for it has like a cell phone with like ghost number one arriving at midnight pop up on it so it's a really neat twist that pulls on like contemporary issues while tying it into the classic that we all know so that's actually at the Midland Center for the Arts and that will be produced she's a recipient of the Kennedy Center's 18 National Musical Theater Award which we are very proud of for her musical theater performance of Foster Love which is the one I'm here to talk about just a little bit it's a two act musical about two sisters in the foster care system as the oldest sister is about to age out and their separation pain and struggle and that's something that she kind of ties into a lot of her works is real life pain and struggle for example one of some of her one acts one takes it's called it comes in waves it's a one act musical that takes place inside a woman's dream the night that she has to make a really hard decision so kind of that subconscious stream of consciousness thought that sometimes we think we can control in a dream but really is just our body processing things but she also does the straight plays such as clean break which about four nurses who work in the ICU of a small hospital and how they have connections and disconnections and how they work through the kind of small town struggles bruised which is a song cycle which I think it's not a medium it's done enough anymore a song cycle based around the theme but someone's biggest flaw can also be their biggest asset which is something that I try to pull on as much as possible so Bostard Love has been produced before but she's also in the process of your work is never finished never completely finished something and so it's being produced at festival 56 which is a festival in Illinois which also happens to be where I'm working this summer so I think she's following me around and so we're doing a stage reading as part of our new work festival there which is the first time that we've actually done a full length piece normally we do like 10 short pieces and so we decided that we wanted to take a risk and invest in her and give her another opportunity to be produced in this capacity so she is working on signing with an agent like as we speak to become fully licensed and you can be able to purchase and produce her plays but her information is on the sheet and she is really actively looking forward to new opportunities she likes collaboration but also to having her current work produced I love musical theater as long as it's not sound of music next up is Morgan Granville she is a student at the University of Iowa I'm a graduate student there in playwriting Dr. G. look at me Hi all like Michael said my name is Morgan I'm an OV drama turned candidate at the University of Iowa and current artistic intern at Herbert stage this summer I'm here to talk to you about Margo Connolly who has written a play called Tough as well as many other great plays I encountered Margo's work in graduate school which she has since graduated and is pursuing the artist diploma at Juilliard this fall Margo is wildly under produced but I did have the opportunity to direct a production of one of Margo's other plays found this past year and in the process I did ask her to send me some of her other plays to try to get a sense of her voice and what she's interested in and just kind of what she's thinking about and she sent me two striking plays one called Quiz Out and one called Tough and I'm here to talk to you about Tough because I remember reading it and being completely bowled over by what I have read for a quick synopsis I'll use the Trouble Teen Bootcamp Crosswind sells itself to parents as a behavior modification program that will help their daughters straighten out the girls who have been sent here however learn is a place of ever changing rules harsh punishments and ever increasing desperation that the program will be shut down if a camper dies the girls plan their escape by whatever means necessary the play is quite jarring and the girls are truly tough and one of the plays greatest triumphs I think is this kind of thriller structure but it kind of flips it on its head by presenting some non-linear moments that you that really pull you in as a collaborator Margot is an absolute dream she feels deeply for the young people that populate her plays she's not interested in the stereotypical teenage girl whatever that trope is and she's not interested in heteronormative stories either she's really interested in the dynamics between groups of young women their agency and their wisdom if you're like me and really energized by this new movement of work about young women and populating them on stage definitely Margot's plays are the place for you she has a new play exchange profile which Tuff is on and you can check out some of her other works so you can grab me the chat again just recap Margot Connolly's Tuff and come talk to me if you want to talk about it thanks thank you very much next we have Molly there she is and she's what's her beehive in New York hello friends I'm Molly Maranek my pronouns are she, her and hers I'm going to read off my phone, sorry about that I'm going to talk to you today about Monet Hearst Mendoza she's a New York based playwright, director and theater producer originally from Pasadena who attended Marymount Manhattan College where she focused on playwriting and directing via page her plays predominantly feature people of color and often deal with heavier subject matters such as morality, exploitation and corruption she explores themes of race, culture and identity in her works and constructs characters that develop unconventional relationships and overcome situations via unique escapist approaches I just thought that was a really great way to talk about her so I figured I would quote her directly in New York she was a lab member at the women's project from 2014 to 16 and then she was a member of the public theaters EWG Emerging Writers Group and she was a Van Lier Playwriting Fellow in the 1618 group so she's just finishing that up now and she's also involved in Rising Circle Theater Collective and she's developed a lot of work there along with the looking glass theater company and classical theater of Harlem so I'm going to talk to you today about her play Veiled which just had it's I guess world premiere at Astoria Performing Arts Center in Astoria and this is a play that is technically Monet's first real production but she has a couple other things that's sort of in the works so what Veiled is about again in her words they're better than mine the play is a modern day twist on the Rapunzel fairy tale it focuses on an Afghani couple that immigrated to the US from Afghanistan at the height of Taliban rule to create a new life for themselves after difficulty conceiving to the sun so as a result of her illness the young girl becomes more sheltered and finds safety and comfort wearing her mother's old burqa though her parents worry about her future and are dismayed at her choice to wear the burqa as it symbolizes the life they escaped the audience gets to watch how Dima grows into young adulthood with the help of some secret friends so those secret friends are a street poet who forms a relationship with Dima from outside her window and a shark that Dima orders online who is a poet so what I love about Monet's writing is how she's able to talk about big picture conceptual issues while stating laser focus on who her characters are and Veiled is about personal identity and the individual ways that we value and honor our culture feeling like an outsider being a minority in America today heavy themes like that the writing represents this world as we know it to be in its heaviness however Monet does excellent work not indulging in the stark reality of all of those themes that women have to offer so there's room to bring in a big puppet shark in a truthful way that isn't schmaltzy so her work sort of honors big ideas without, while escaping being indulgent in those in the message so I got to know Monet's writing I directed a short play of hers in summer 2015 with the Oneness Project and the title of that play it's just, it's one scene, it's about 10 minutes long and the title is neat or thin girl stretching so as you'd expect it looks at objectification and in the play for sort of vapid women speak of body image and their desire to be beautiful all while pining for Dave to eagerly return to them and as they're doing this they are stretching and getting limber and wearing spandex so they are so when Dave finally does make his appearance at the end of the play to their absolute drooling delight the audience sees that he's dressed as a butcher and hung early holding a meat cleaver the women are oblivious and the play ends before we learn what happens next it's obviously not very subtle they're literally meat but this twist shows how Monet's story is used directness to make her point while never aggressive or didactic she's great at using common familiar worlds to portray extreme concepts that stand for something meaningful so I think that Monet's talent as a storyteller and her wonderful and generous imagination will lead to a long career as a playwright I think she has a lot more to give to the world of theatre and this is just the beginning and the tipping point for her and I hope that her work gets opportunities regionally because I think her stories are beautifully universal and her interest in identity and culture is something that resonates in communities that aren't big metropolitan areas so I hope that she gets to have her voice shared sort of across the country and the world as well as just in New York City where she happens to have built her career so again her name is Monet Herstimendoza the play is veiled and ask me more about it later if you want to thank you Monet next up Jeff Pearl University of Puget Sound leads no introduction but he got one anyway it begins with a letter a young woman has written a young man once upon a time they had been friends or maybe something more than friends now they have been separated for months maybe longer the woman's father a preacher objected to the young man to disobey his wishes and so for this and perhaps other reasons they parted the letter as letters will do had gone missing but as soon as the young man our men gets it he goes in search of its author Nina although all he has is the name of a town a place in the north country with the help of the village post office he finds her about 10 miles outside of town at an old isolated house concerned our men because Nina seems so sure she had found a radical new truth she had left her home to join a strange band of believers led by a charismatic prophet named Timothy this was not the Nina that once upon a time Armin had known someone who had been a seeker after truth and meaning who enjoyed the journey as much as the destination the Nina of the letter had traded questions for answers and the answers seemed dangerous in the way they appealed to a mind weary of complexity with predictions of a coming apocalypse predictions delivered by a chosen one someone assembling a small community of believers to face with him the end of days when Armin and Nina finally meet in the front room of the old house she greets him warmly but she has no memory of sending a letter of calling out to him even obliquely asked from her is that she go with him for a walk that for a few minutes she step away from the house that has become a home for her and others who are so sure of what they know and this at one level is the fundamental tension around which Russell Davis's new play Trespasser in a Promised Land is built will Nina leave one one space the room that epitomizes the enclosure insisted upon by a new found community for another space one open to change the central elements are typo a room a letter inside outside the space between two people what might open that space what might close it down what is most important about this room in this play is Nina's refusal to leave it for Armin a conversation active open-ended listening and speaking cannot begin within its walls the room is whatever makes existential change impossible really so and in this sense Nina's room may not be so different from rooms of one sort or another we all may without knowing it find ourselves in even if this particular room Nina's room has been more maliciously designed at a time in which citizens of many countries find themselves increasingly isolated from one another in a range of ways culture class politics ideology this image of a room that separates and it closes is crucial to an understanding of who we are and how we might be letters are in earlier forms messages delivered by messengers have an even longer theatrical lineage than dramas that take place in little rooms there are icons for the way language may or may not be able to bridge the distance between people there's such a persistent dramatic convention that playwrights are occasionally criticized for employing them at all especially when they do not appear until the end of the play and then in order to compensate for weakness in the plot in trespassers the letter appears in the first moments it is the intrusion that sets the engine of desire in motion space, language, arrows the building blocks of theater trespasser in a promised land uses these elements to explore a landscape central to much of Davis's extensive body of work a set of lean, dense, demanding at times nearly inscrutable plays marked by a childlike wonder and a rich if dry sense of humor trespasser also takes up several interrelated phenomena that are near the heart of many of Russell's plays the act of lying, a particularly relevant motif these days the unreliability of the mind our need to believe in that needs dangers, to learn more you have to get the rest of this paper or better yet get a copy of the play just a quick question Jeff, how many characters are in the play? 5, 6 I'm not really losing my voice Next we have Yvette Nolan Hello She is a director, writer and actor based in Saskatchewan and she will be presenting Donna Michel Saint-Ponniere Welcome to this is dish with one spoon territory which is a covenant between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe people about taking care of the land around here and the lakes and everyone who visits so welcome to this territory on ab day our day, our one day I'm going to talk about Donna Michel Saint-Ponniere who is an emcee she's a word slinger, she's a poet and she's a playwright I met her first as the general manager for native earth performing arts she came to be the general manager at native earth and she said about in the first year would you mind looking at some of my writing and I said sure thinking she'd bring me a few pages and she brought me like hundreds of pages and it was four or five or six plays and so I I read them and then she was like waiting and she said so and I said so and she said well which one should I work on and I said oh I like this one Gas Girls and so she turned her focus to developing Gas Girls which is a play about two young women on the Zimbabwean border who trade sex for gas in order to live then she produced it off the side of her desk at native earth with her company New Harlem and then she got nominated for governor general's award for the play and then she won a Dora for it which is the Toronto theatre award so she won the Dora award and when she went to accept the award for the Dora she got up on stage and she said this is the first play in my 1954 ology and people laughed because she's writing 54 plays about the 54 African countries and people laughed they thought she was joking that was 2010 since then she's developed and produced a number of plays there's like a dozen countries she has done and the next one that got produced at Persephone is a man of fish also nominated for governor general's award so I'm pretty good at picking them which is what I'm going to tell you that the next one that should be picked up and produced is called Conjugal and not because I'm attached to it as the dramaturg Conjugal so this was Zimbabwe this was Burundi, Conjugal is Malawi and it's about a poet who is imprisoned because his words are inciting the people to rebellion and to resistance because words are dangerous and Donna Michelle knows it better than anyone else she does all kinds of plays there are TY plays there's dance theater plays there's linear theater there's multi-disc theater she's so prolific she puts me to shame and yet she still lets me keep reading her plays and choosing which ones she should develop next I do have a paper I have some of these which lists like only eight of the 54 ology that she's working on but you can also go to the 54 ology website and take a look at where they are she also lists like these ones have been done legit these ones are in workshop stages these ones can be like you can actually go she can't be stopped she exhausts me and Playwrights Canada Press also gave me these plays to use as props Playwrights Canada Press and I'm allowed to give these out so if anyone wants a of these plays that I'm giving out I see someone at the back going I do or be one of these sheets with a list of the plays and how to get a hold of Don Michelle St. Bernard I'll be around so we'll be right back our next speaker had to suddenly go home because of a health emergency with her cat so and she was going to be talking about a Native American playwright so that's very unfortunate doubly so I think so we hope forward to Jeremy Stoll I was one of the I was one of the dramaturgs on Off The Rails we're going to be talking about it sure could you give us a few minutes a couple minutes hi I'm Wayne and Mike I'm not Jean Bruce Scott right Off The Rails is Randy Reinholtz's adaptation of Measure for Measure Randy Reinholtz for those of you who don't know he's the artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry and he wrote this play when he thought he was going to retire and he did the first workshop there at Native Voices and then he didn't retire and the first full production was at OSF and I had the privilege of being one of the dramaturgs on it this is to my mind it's better than Measure for Measure when I'm reading it the first time I read it I was reading the prison scene when the sister tells her brother hey so Angelo said that he'll let you go but only if I have sex with him and in Randy's play this becomes a discussion about the ethics not just of how to survive as a native person but whether or not it actually is ethical to survive is the objection so intense that maybe you're better off dead and if not then how far do you go ethically to save your life and to save the lives of your community and it becomes a drop-down argument between the brother and the sister and this is the moment that turned me on to the play that made me think I need to work on this I need to find, I need to Randy I want to work on your play and when we did the production it was the most amazing opening I've ever been to we ended the play with a round dance which is a kind of pow wow dance or just anybody can dance and stage management was saying during previews so you can maybe bring up six people that might be the safe number and the first production we had members streaming down the aisles to come up on stage it's not like you're going to tell them no so we had I don't know 15 or 20 people up in this round dance and it was heartening and then Angelo the bad guy this is the only production this is the only production that I have ever heard of villain being legitimately booed which it says how well he acted and also says something to how well Randy wrote a play that resonated with native audiences and that to my mind and to my experience and being there on opening and just being a native person in the room with it is it's a very affirmative play and it's a very affirmative play to have had done at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival uh right that's um that's all the story I have to say about that thank you very much Jeremy Stoller is up next he is another Beehive from the Beehive Dramaturgical Studio in New York thank you hi I'm Jeremy Stoller I'm a New York based dramaturg I respond to story driven narratives not necessarily presented in a traditional way but that take you on a real journey I love when I hear the generative artists distinct point of view on the world in their work on a masterful use of language plays that have a real dramaturgical integrity I love their own set of rules and I either obey or break them in interesting ways and I have integrity about how they exist with the world around them I love heightened realities and scripts that play around with familiar forms and imagine them anew Ricardo Perez Gonzalez does all of these things he's a playwright based in both New York and LA he cites his influences Federico Garcia Lorca Sarah Kane, Tennessee Williams, Rebecca Gillman he's an alumnus of the emerging radio group at the public theater in New York he said the following in an interview about finding his voice when he was in graduate school after a period of trying to keep himself out of his own place quote, when I was there I started thinking about my beliefs and my belief system and my life and identity and belonging and where I fit in the world and all these pictures starting coming up these splits being caught between my past and my history feeling like I'm from Puerto Rico even though I wasn't born there being a disbeliever and somehow still believing in faith and spirit in the magic of my abuelas both of my abuelas dreamed prophecy and that was family history and I believe that even though I don't believe such things so there's this bifurcation in the way I see the world end quote Ricardo has several previously produced plays which I hope you'll check out but I'm going to focus on his recent unproduced work the play that introduced me to Ricardo is called Undergrounds of Belonging it's the first in this trilogy of plays that center on the love story between Russell and Thomas a black man and a white man which chart their lives from the late 1950s to the present on the grounds of belonging is set in the tight knit but racially segregated 1950s Houston gay community it starts when Thomas and what was supposed to be his drag performance debut at the all white bar finds one of the regularly occurring raids going on there and for his physical safety he begs enters into the blacks only gay bar across the street where he meets Russell the play doesn't shy away from the genuine danger that the relationship places both of them but especially Russell and or the differences in their life experiences but it also dramatizes the physical and intellectual attraction between the two men and the seductive power they feel in being seen and understood and loved for the first time the play consciously references Romeo and Juliet in its story of young lovers who connect in a time of turmoil and some of the plot mechanics that allow Russell and Thomas to meet clandestinely and then which later separate them echo Shakespeare's text but unlike Romeo and Juliet Russell and Thomas end the play alive I think don't reach the tragic end that makes few narratives often reserved for gay characters it's instead something that we haven't seen much of it's a juicy romance centered on queer people and people of color charged with intelligence and erotic energy and characters who are unashamed and unquestioning about their sexuality it's got this heightened colorful romanticism that also suggests the film melodramas of Douglas Cirque it leans fully into this gut punch pulpiness of those movies but with overtly queer characters when I saw it at the public studio in workshop production the full house went nuts for it the unwritten second play in the trilogy has lovers reuniting decades later and in the final play which is written the more they stay Russell and Thomas are in their 80s living in New York City having enjoyed decades together and finding themselves dealing with their deteriorating health and considering dying with dignity while also caring for a younger gay couple that they have informally adopted Russell and Thomas share the challenges of their later years with a lingering heap of sexual attraction and intellectual connection because of the AIDS crisis robbing us of the generation of queer artists and a generation of queer men who would now be the relative age of Russell and Thomas this is again a story that we haven't seen a lot of both for the quality of its writing and for introducing to a canon a story that we've been starved of this play is moving and noteworthy neither of the existing plays in the trilogy has been produced the plays are five characters and designed to be produced with a single set of actors in rep and whole trilogy his newest work which is separate from the trilogy is called don't eat the mangoes three adult sisters living outside of San Juan Puerto Rico are faced with a daunting task of caring for their cancer stricken mother and their wheelchair bound father despite being paralyzed their abusive father still rules his family through fear and intimidation by the plays and both parents have died one taking their own life one having their life taken and their daughters will have begun a process of working through family trauma with varying degrees of success a marketing team might sell it as little foxes with sweeper of youth crossed with House of Bernardo Alba and that would kind of give you some sense of it the lineage that Gonzalez suggested when he referenced Lorca and Williams and Cain can be seen here again he's stirring up a recognizable form which is the American family drama and with colors with characters of color with queerness with elements of the supernatural there's revelations in the play there's a family secret that's not going to shock anyone who's seen plays as much as it talks to the members of the family but Gonzalez knows this and he builds the play not around the revelations of what's happened but how the family confronts it he squeezes every element of drama and beauty and poetry and horror that he can and stories and like Williams at his best he brings him right to the edge of too muchness which I love his plays center around family units and they take familiar forms that we already know and know that we enjoy and populate them with queer characters and people of color there's always a high entertainment value the combination of the expected and the unexpected makes them wildly satisfying and completely watchable he's also a great and bold re-writer in the rehearsal room and a lovely human being so we'll check out his work thank you Jeremy our final presenter Gavin Witt from the center stage in Baltimore where he's another artistic associate something nice good tie up you almost made it you did it with the un-pardon coughing paroxysms if they take me over I want to be sure to thank you Michael for putting this together it's wonderful and thank you to all the other presenters for sharing your passion and insight into that work it's just what a tremendous value this adds I find to LMDA Gavin Witt, he-him-his Baltimore center stage proud LMDA board member and it's my privilege today to talk about Miranda Rose Hall Baltimore Native currently living and working out of Charm City but poised to explore it beyond that she came to Baltimore center stage initially for a year long playwriting residency with the aim of working on her graduate school admission play she wrote a ton of other plays didn't really work on that one so much but did proceed off to Yale for her MFA she's now a year out back in Baltimore in the interim very much poised for a breakout the play that she sanctioned me to talk about The Hour of Great Mercy will have its world premiere at Diversionary Theater this winter and her more recent play plot points in our sexual development is slated I think it's not yet announced unfortunately so it is slated for what I will is a New York premiere fairly significant and noteworthy New York premiere or Bordelan will direct so keep an eye out for Miranda on those that's coming this fall it's hard to pin one work down Miranda I have found writes a wildly diverse array of work we did a reading of menstruation a period piece for in places that was during this she has a piece called Bulgaria Volt based on some political traditional narratives of Bulgaria but also writes deeply human more naturalistic work like this tends to be focused on queer characters and experiences not exclusively and inevitably in every work I think manifests a powerful profound sense of empathy towards all of her characters in a remarkable way even characters who you would think would have every reason to be despicable in that work Miranda finds a way to explore their humanity and the network of obligation and relation that drive everyone I have printed out maybe if you want to pick up more contact info and bio you can find her on NPX your agent info so this will be I'll drop it off to the side after I have great mercy which I was lucky it was her thesis piece at Yale I was lucky enough to direct it at the MFA player age workshop last summer it was then featured in the NNPM showcase in Orlando diversionary as I said is doing it it's ready for rolling world premiere other productions I think it's very much worth picking up a diverse cast of five including two Asian American actors facing a personal crossroads and a dire diagnosis ed until recently a Jesuit priest based out of Baltimore Catholic capital returns to the icy and isolated confines of Bethlehem, Alaska in a last-ditch effort to reconcile with his estranged family upon arrival he finds a community still shaken by a five-year-old tragedy that also overturned his own life and in which he and for which his complicity is in question as ed his brother and the tight-knit but tightly wound community test the limits of their capacity to forgive and forget unexpected and unforeseen love along with new bonds of found family blossom beneath the starry Alaskan sky that's a teaser account but I think characteristically I would say the piece was inspired in part by a combination of real life experiences and observations that Miranda drew on filtered through her wild imaginative capacity based in part on these include the two years the playwright spent serving marginalized populations and communities with the Jesuit volunteer West the persons of that time she spent in Anchorage and elsewhere in Alaska Alaska is very much a recurring backdrop to her work literally but also the networks of those communities and the nature of that isolation and how people forge bonds within it and the playwright's direct experience with radio broadcasting via her father's work is an on air host specifically his extended documentary project that recorded literally and figuratively the decline in death from ALS of a close family friend the realities of which she implanted into the hour of great mercy the biography includes or if you look at NBX includes the many residencies she's done the other affiliations she's done that include New York Theater Workshop playwrights playwrights realm orchard project as we've heard on a number of these cases and Jeremy just pointed it out also a tremendous human being to work with a great rewriter and reviser directing the workshop of this fall of different play of hers I would get up to make adjustments with actors and start talking only to hevers of quality say I already rewrote that section it's changed she's very collaborative in the room really intuitive works extremely well with actors and I cannot endorse her highly enough to your attention I'll wrap it up there thanks again for the opportunity I think everyone really agree with me there's an awful lot of good plays out there that we wouldn't have heard of we haven't been here it kind of reminded me of a Norwegian saying throw your net far out think about it another thing I enjoyed about the session first is hearing other drama turns exciting refuels so thank you to all of our presenters and you for coming