2012 National Playwrights Conference
PROVENANCE by Anne Garcia-Romero
TWO LAKES, TWO RIVERS by Laura Jacqmin
HYPE HERO (King Patch) by Dominic Taylor
ORANGE JULIUS by Basil Kreimendahl
THE TALL GIRLS by Meg Miroshnik
THE WAY OF THINGS by Theresa Rebeck
Greg Kotis, Writer in Residence
Directors and Casting for all shows
PROVENANCE
by Anne García-Romero
Performances: Wednesday, July 4; Thursday, July 5
In Los Angeles, two sisters receive a stolen painting created by their Mexican great-grandfather. Will the women keep the portrait in the family or sell the valuable artwork in order to survive?
Anne García-Romero’s plays include Paloma (National Latino Playwriting Award runner-up), Earthquake Chica (National Latino Playwriting Award finalist), Mary Peabody in Cuba (National Latino Playwriting Award finalist), Land of Benjamin Franklin (Actors Theater of Louisville Ten Minute Play finalist), Horsey Girl (Ensemble Studio Theater One-Act Marathon finalist), Don Quixote de la Minny, Marta's Magnificent Mundo, Desert Longing, Juanita's Statue, and Santa Concepción. Her plays have been developed and produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, Arielle Tepper Productions’ Summer Play Festival (Off- Broadway), The Mark Taper Forum, Hartford Stage, South Coast Repertory, INTAR, HERE, New Georges, Borderlands Theater, Nevada Repertory Company, Jungle Theater, East L.A. Repertory, Open Fist Theater Company, Wordbridge Playwrights Laboratory, and LoNyLa Writers Lab. She's received commissions from the NYSF/Public Theater, The Mark Taper Forum, and South Coast Repertory.
Ms. García-Romero is currently developing a screenplay adaptation of her play, Mary Peabody in Cuba, with actor/director/producer, Andy Garcia. She has also written for Peninsula Films, Elysian Films and Disney Creative Entertainment. She is the U.S. translator for the internationally acclaimed The Grönholm Method by Spanish playwright, Jordi Galcerán. She’s been a Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis as well as a MacDowell Colony fellow.
She’s taught at USC, Cal Arts, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, Loyola Marymount University, Macalester College, and Wesleyan University. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts and NoPassport Press. Her work has also been published in The Best Women's Stage Monologues of 2008 and The Best Stage Scenes of 2008 (Smith & Kraus). Ms. García-Romero holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama and is an alumna of New Dramatists. She currently lives in Indiana where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. www.annegarciaromero.com
RECLAMATION
by Ken Weitzman
Performances: Friday, July 6; Saturday, July 7
It’s 2020 in the American West, and water shortages are forcing entire towns to relocate to urban centers. On the brink of relocation, Leland and Zach, a water manager and his assistant, attempt an unusual deal to save their town and what they call the ‘Spirit of the West.’
Ken Weitzman’s plays include The Catch (The Denver Center Theatre Company), Fire in the Garden (Indiana Repertory Theatre), The As If Body Loop (Humana Festival), Arrangements (Atlantic Theatre Company), Spin Moves (The Summer Play Festival), Stadium 360 (Out of Hand Theater), Memorabilia (Alliance Theatre), Hominid (Out of Hand Theatre/Theatre Emory/Oerol Festival Netherlands.) These plays and others were developed with The New Harmony Project, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Arena Stage, the Geva Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, New York Stage and Film, Hartford Stage, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Page 73 Productions, Out of Hand Theatre, the Lark Play Development Center.
Awards include The L. Arnold Weissberger Award for Arrangements, The Henry Award and an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award for The Catch, the Fratti/Newman Political Play Contest Award for Fire in the Garden. Commissions include Arena Stage, the Alliance Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Theatre Emory, and South Coast Repertory (the Elizabeth George Commission for an Outstanding Emerging Playwright.) Ken received his MFA from UCSD and BA from the University of Michigan. Currently he heads the graduate playwriting program at Indiana University and serves on the board of The New Harmony Project.
TWO LAKES, TWO RIVERS
by Laura Jacqmin
Performances: Wednesday, July 11; Thursday, July 12
In a Midwestern town, college boys are drinking ‘n’ drowning for no apparent reason – despite whatever spells the Moms are casting at their 24/7 memorial. Then Peter disappears – without admitting to the crime his ex-girlfriend Bonnie is sure he’s guilty of. As the town tries to solve the mystery of what’s happening, Bonnie tries to understand what’s already happened.
Laura Jacqmin was the winner of the 2008 Wasserstein Prize, a $25,000 award to recognize an emerging female playwright. Her plays include Ski Dubai (Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s First Look Rep), Look, We Are Breathing (Sundance Theatre Lab), and Dental Society Midwinter Meeting (which enjoyed a sold-out run in Chicago in 2010, and was remounted at 16th Street Theater and Theater on the Lake in 2011). Two Lakes, Two Rivers was commissioned by the Goodman Theatre, and further developed through the Royal Court Theatre’s 2011 International Residency. Her short play Hero Dad (a finalist for the 2012 Heideman Award) premiered in the 2012 Humana Festival of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Her work has been produced and developed by Long Wharf Theatre, Atlantic Theater, Roundabout Underground, Vineyard Theatre, Cape Cod Theatre Project, Ars Nova, Second Stage, Chicago Dramatists, and more. From 2007 to 2008, she was a contributing writer for The Onion A.V. Club and A.V. Club Chicago. Jacqmin was a member of the inaugural 2010-2011 Playwrights’ Unit at the Goodman Theatre. She has been commissioned by South Coast Rep, Goodman Theatre, Arden Theater Company, InterAct Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater/NNPN, and Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project. BA Yale University; MFA Ohio University.
HYPE HERO (King Patch)
by Dominic Taylor
Performances: Friday, July 13; Saturday, July 14
Large corporations have taken over the debt of poor citizens and one of these citizens {Rick (a patched man on his way to work)} has the temerity to ask the mayor a question. Since he cannot reach the corporation, he figured asking his local representative could answer his question. Since he is already in debt, how much will the answer cost us?
Dominic Taylor is the Associate Artistic Director of the Penumbra Theatre Company. His most recent play I Wish You Love premiered at Penumbra Theatre in the April of 2011, and was produced at both The Kennedy Center and at Hartford Stage last year. His written work includes Wedding Dance and Personal History both produced at the Kennedy Center by the African Continuum Theatre. Wedding Dance was originally produced at The Crossroads Theatre. Both Personal History and Wedding Dance are available at Playscripts.com. His work Upcity Service(S) is in an anthology by BROADWAY PLAY PUBLISHING entitled – Seven More Different Plays edited by Mac Wellman. He has directed a variety of theatre projects including the opera Fresh Faust at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, The Negroes Burial Ground at The Kitchen, Destiny and Uppa Creek at Dixon Place, and Ride The Rhthym in the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival. At Penumbra, he reimagined and restaged the last two Black Nativities: Black Nativity: A Change Is Going To Come and Black Nativity: Now’s The Time!
He has worked with The Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, The Public Theatre, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, New York Theatre Workshop, Crossroads Theater, Rites and Reasons Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Studio Theatre among others.
He has been awarded grants from Theatre Communications Group, The Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Foundation, The Dramatists Guild, The Illinois Arts Council, The Connecticut Commission on the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation as well as other organizations.
He is also the Associate Artistic Director of America-In-Play. He is an alumni member of New Dramatists. He holds a Bachelors' as well as a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Brown University. He is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is also on the Board for The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature.
ALLIGATOR
by Hilary Bettis
Performances: Wednesday, July 18; Thursday, July 19
Emerald and her twin brother, Ty, are orphaned ‘gator wrestlers living in the backwoods of the Florida Everglades, but their sideshow days are close to an end when a doe-eyed runaway, Lucy, shows up on their porch in the middle of a thunderstorm. As Lucy's desperation to win Emerald over intensifies, she will do whatever it takes to please her…even if it leads to murder. The only hope left rests on Emerald who must face the demon that haunts her every waking moment.
Hilary Bettis is the first recipient of the James McLure Fellowship for playwriting from New River Dramatists. She received the Sloan/EST commission (Dakota Atoll) and a private commission from Carol Ostrow Productions (untitled play in development) in 2011. She was the 2009 recipient of the John N. Wall Fellowship for playwriting at Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She received two fellowships from New River Dramatists in 2009. She was a 2010 semi-finalist for the Julliard Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright Fellowship. Her play, Mexico, was nominated for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She was the recipient of a one-time grant from Cherry Jones and Abingdon Theatre Company to support an emerging female playwright. Hilary has had readings and workshops with New Georges, The Lark, EST, Abingdon, Barrow Street, and The Aurora Fox in Denver. Her play, American Girls, was produced Off-Broadway at 45th Street Theatre in 2008, was anthologized in Best Monologues of 2009 and Best Stage Scenes of 2008 both published by Smith & Kraus, and McFarland & Company, Inc. published the complete play. She collaborated with SilverLine Cinema on her debut short film, B’Hurst, which she also acted in and executive produced. B’Hurst has screened at the 2011 Williamsburg Film Festival, the 2012 IFS Festival (she won best actress in a short), and was a finalist for the 2012 Nashville Film Festival.
Hilary began acting professionally as a teenager. She has been in national commercials, television pilots, independent films, and numerous New York and regional theater productions. She is a member of SAG, AEA, Dramatists Guild, The Drama League, TCG, Playwrights’ Center, and Fractured Atlas. She is a member of EST and an affiliated artist with New Georges. She is a staff writer for offoffonline.com. Hilary lives in Brooklyn, New York with her three cats and is a proud owner of two Arabian horses. In her free time Hilary rides horses and dabbles on the violin.
ORANGE JULIUS
by Basil Kreimendahl
Performances: Friday, July 20; Saturday, July 21
After being poisoned by Agent Orange in the jungles of Vietnam, Julius is dying of intestinal cancer. Nut, his queer daughter, tries to reconnect with her father as one man to another by caring for his decaying body, sorting through her childhood memories, and diving into war movie fantasies. As worlds and identities blur, Nut finds herself fighting for her father’s life in ways she never expected.
Basil Kreimendahl is currently a graduate student in playwriting at the University of Iowa. Her plays have been developed by New York Theatre Workshop, About Face Theatre, Wordbridge, Courier 12 Collective in Chicago, and Stageworks in Florida. She is the recipient of an Arts Meets Activism grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Basil has taught playwriting to elementary, high school, and college students in Florida, Kentucky, New York, and Iowa. She organized and ran a playwrights group for queer youth in Louisville called Out On The Edge. Her short plays have twice been finalists for the Heideman Award and Dancing the Dark was produced by Actors Theatre of Lousiville in their 24-hour play festival. Basil’s play The Cost of a Goat won 2nd place National Science Award from KCACTF in 2012. Her work has been published by Dramatic Publishing and included in Xlibria’s Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender and Identity.
THE TALL GIRLS
by Meg Miroshnik
Performances: Wednesday, July 25; Thursday, July 26
Welcome to Poor Prairie, the dusty, desolate town where fifteen-and-a-half-year-old Jean has been exiled as caretaker for her wild-child cousin, Almeda. It’s a grim, dangerous place to eke out an existence as a teenage girl—until a handsome man with a past arrives, a brand-new basketball in tow. As the town’s girls come together to form a team set on making it out of Poor Prairie, a murky committee of townspeople threatens to stamp out girls’ sports altogether.
Meg Miroshnik's plays include The Fairytale Lives Of Russian Girls, The Droll {Or, A StagePlay About The End Of Theatre}, The Tall Girls, and A Portrait Of The Woman As A Young Artist. The Fairytale Lives Of Russian Girls was a finalist for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the winner of the 2011-2012 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award, and premiered at the Alliance Theatre in February 2012 (directed by Eric Rosen); in a Russian translation by Maria Kroupnik, the play is the winner of the Masterskaya na Begavoi and was produced by the Moscow Playwright and Director Center (directed by Ilya Shagalov). Her work has been developed or produced by Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Rep, the Kennedy Center, Lark New Play Development Center, Yale Cabaret, the Carlotta Festival at Yale, Perishable Theatre, WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory, One Coast Collaboration, and published in Best American Short Plays, 2008-2009 (Applause, 2010). Current projects include an adaptation of the libretto for Shostakovich’s opera MOSCOW, CHERYOMUSHKI (re-orchestrated by Gerard McBurney, conducted by Alexander Platt, and directed by Mike Donahue) for Chicago Opera Theater in April 2012 and a commission for a new play for South Coast Repertory. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama where she studied with Paula Vogel.
THE WAY OF THINGS
by Theresa Rebeck; directed by Wendy C. Goldberg
Performances: Friday, July 27; Saturday, July 28
The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center has announced the development of The Way of Things byTheresa Rebeck, an adaptation ofWilliam Congreve's restoration comedy The Way Of The World, as the eighth play of the 2012 National Playwrights Conference. The Way of Things replaces Ms. Rebeck's previously announced Fool. In this modern adaptation of Congreve's classic comedy, Rebeck lampoons the 1% and explores what true love means in an insincere world: "It's another summer in the Hamptons?everyone is drinking, shopping, gossiping, and bed-swapping. An heiress and her aunt unexpectedly find themselves at the heart of this summer's scandal when they both become entangled in the same smooth-talking bachelor's web."
Theresa Rebeck is a widely produced playwright. New York productions include Seminar,The Understudy, Mauritius, The Scene, The Water’s Edge, Bad Dates, The Butterfly Collection, Spike Heels, Loose Knit, The Family of Mann, View of the Dome, and Omnium Gatherum (co-written, Pulitzer finalist). Publications include her Collected Plays Volume I (volumes II and III, fall 2007), Free Fire Zone (fall 2007), all with Smith & Kraus, and two novels, Three Girls and Their Brother and Twelve Rooms with a View, with Random House/Shaye Areheart Books.
Produced feature films include Harriet the Spy, Gossip, and the independent features Sunday on the Rocks and Seducing Charlie Barker (adapted from her play The Scene). Awards include the Writer’s Guild of America Award for Episodic Drama and a Peabody Award for her work on NYPD Blue. She has also won the National Theatre Conference Award, the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award, the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award, an Alex Award, and a Lilly Award. She is the creator of the NBC drama, SMASH.
Ms. Rebeck is a Contributing Editor to the Harvard Review, an Associate Artist of the Roundabout Theatre Company. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Lark and believe it or not she is the Treasurer of the Dramatist Guild. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jess and two children, Cooper and Cleo.
UNTITLED GREG KOTIS PROJECT
Eli’s a stay-at-home dad. Eli’s secretly in love with Ms. Melissa, his son’s 5th grade teacher.Russell just lost his job, so now he’s a stay-at-home dad, too. Russell’s starting to fall for Ms.Melissa, which is a problem because Eli’s been holding a torch for Ms. Melissa a lot longer than Russell. Ms. Harper is the school’s principal. She’s dealing with severe budget cuts - and now, two fathers who seem to be putting the moves on her favorite teacher. Set in a public elementary school in Brooklyn, this new play explores parenthood, education, and the perils of adults playing with fire.
Greg Kotis (Writer in Residence) is the author of many plays and musicals including Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards, The Boringest Poem in the World, Yeast Nation (Book/Lyrics), The Truth About Santa, Pig Farm, Eat the Taste, Urinetown (Book/Lyrics, for which he won an Obie Award and two Tony® Awards), and Jobey and Katherine. His work has been produced and developed in theaters across the country and around the world, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Conservatory Theater, American Theater Company, Henry Miller’s Theatre (Broadway), Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Stage and Film, Perseverance Theatre, Roundabout Theatre Company, Soho Rep, South Coast Rep, and The Old Globe, among others. Greg is a member of the Neo-Futurists, the Cardiff Giant Theater Company, ASCAP, the Dramatists Guild, and was a 2010-11 Lark Play Development Center Playwrights Workshop Fellow. He grew up in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Ayun Halliday, his daughter India, and his son Milo.