ABOUT THE PLAYS & PLAYWRIGHTS

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MOTLEY FOOL

As You Like It is over, but Rosalind and Orlando still have much to work out before their marriage is exactly as they like it in this flirtatious and provocative vignette.

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Kate Abbruzzese is a New York City based actress and recent graduate of the NYU Grad Acting program.  Her other play, Before the Storm, about Caliban and Miranda's time on the island prior to The Tempest, was performed at NYU's Freeplay Festival, and was one of three plays (and one excellent clown show) selected to be remounted for NYU's callback weekend.  Currently, she is performing as Jessica in The Merchant of Venice and Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare & Co.  When not acting, she writes and illustrates the cartoon "heartfelt", about a little heart's adventures in the forest.

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SWANSONG

Leda, the Spartan Queen, tells the real version of events surrounding her union with Jove, the King of the Gods, in this elegantly powerful verse monologue about women, war and transformation.

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Emily Taplin Boyd is a playwright, actor and director. Her first two plays were performed in Barrington Stage Company’s 10x10 New Play Festival. As an actor, Emily appeared in NYC and regionally (including Red Bull’s reading, The Admirable Crighton). She is a proud member of AEA. As a director, Emily staged an award-winning production of her own translation/adaptation of Euripides' Andromache. Emily has a Classical Acting degree from LAMDA, an AB in Performance from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Medieval/Renaissance Studies from Columbia, where she focused on performance and pedagogy in Anglo-Saxon England. Swansong is her third play. emilytaplinboyd.com

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MALAPROP

Inspired by an unfortunate community theater production of Sive by John B. Keane, this joyous comedy provides an unexpectedly relevant and rousing call for new voices on our stages.

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Lisa D'Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist. She is one half of the OBIE-Award winning performance duo PearlDamour. Her plays have been commissioned and produced by theaters across the country, including The Women's Project, Playwrights' Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, Clubbed Thumb, Steppenwolf Theater Company (Chicago) The Wilma Theater (Philadelphia), Woolly Mammoth Theater (D.C.) and the Royal National Theater (London). Lisa's play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize. Lisa is a core member of the Playwrights’ Center and a recent alumna of New Dramatists. PearlDamour.com

 

THE GHOUL OF AMHERST

A gothic imagining of Emily Dickinson at the bedside of a dying schoolmate becomes a darkly comic evisceration of the merciless passion at the heart of poetic pursuits.

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Amy Freed was nominated as a finalist in the drama category of the 1998 Pulitzer Prizes for her play Freedomland. Her play The Psychic Life of Savages won the Joseph Kesselring Award and the Charles McArthur Award for outstanding new play. She wrote the The Beard of Avon, Safe in Hell, You, Nero, The Monster-Builder, Hell to Pay, and more. Her work has been produced at New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle Repertory, American Conservatory Theater, Goodman Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and other theaters around the US. She currently teaches acting and playwriting at Stanford University.

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WARP AND WEFT

This dream-like take on the spidery transformation of Arachne at the hands of Athena weaves a powerfully poetic tale of godly arrogance and human defiance.

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Anchuli Felicia King is a playwright, composer and designer of Thai-Australian descent. Her writing for the theatre is marked by a playfulness with language and a hybridization of forms and subjects. (Anchuli) Felicia served for many years as the resident sound designer for Four Letter Word Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently completing her MFA at Columbia University, where she is specializing in dramaturgy. Outside of school, she is passionate about international new play development, composing for dance and designing Augmented Reality technology for the theatre.

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HER FATHER'S DAUGHTER

This brilliantly imagined prequel to Sheridan’s School for Scandal tells the scandalous origin story of the inimitable Lady Sneerwell. How did she come to sneer so well?

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Dakin Matthews is a playwright, dramaturge, translator, and actor.  His verse play The Prince of LA won the Ted Schmitt Award for best original play (Los Angeles, 2005).  He won a special Drama Desk Award for his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV (Lincoln Center, 2004). His verse translations of Spanish Golden Age plays have won four Walker Reid Awards. His plays Uncommon Players and Feast of Ashes were commissioned by the Old Globe, San Diego. The Great Fugue was produced in the Plays-in-Progress program at ACT (San Francisco). His one act Tea was part of the Antaeus Company’s Ten-Minute Play Festival. He has appeared in over 250 stage productions, over 250 episodes of television, and over 30 films. He is currently appearing in Waitress in New York, his sixth Broadway production.

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THE EIGHTH CIRCLE

Somewhere in the 5th Bolgia of Dante's 8th Circle of Hell, a corrupt politician and his wife find themselves hilariously confronted with an eternity of punishment for their sins.

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Bridgette Dutta Portman’s plays have been read and produced in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the country, and overseas. She is currently president of the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco, a founding member of Ex Nihilo Theater, an associate artist at Wily West Productions, and a member of the Pear Writers' Guild. She is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University. Her short comedy The Pequod Meets the Ocean Steward was included in Red Bull's 2014 Short New Play Festival, and she is delighted to be returning this year with another comedy featuring verse and classical themes. More information about Bridgette and her plays can be found at bridgetteduttaportman.com.

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THE OPULENT COMPLEX

After a bloody coup, In a lavish fantasyland of ill-gotten opulence, a man and a woman revel in the spoils of their recent rebellion in this troubling allegory for our times.

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Lynn Rosen's plays have been produced or developed with: Actors Theatre of Louisville, TheatreWorks (Silicon Valley), Women's Project, New Georges, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Centerstage (Baltimore), Studio Theatre, Red Bull Theater, Working Theater, Barrington Stage, The New Group, The Lark, terraNOVA Collective, New Harmony, GEVA, Fault Line, The Brick, among others. Lynn co-writes/co-created the award-winning web series Darwin, directed by Carrie Preston, which was named one of the “Top Ten Best Web Series of 2015” by Paste Magazine. Upcoming: Bernhard, UCSB; The Firebirds Take the Field, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, Chicago; I Love You, Playing On Air. Lynn is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists.