Marcus Gardley News

Berkeley's acclaimed Aurora Theatre Company has announced a call for submissions for its eighth season of the Global Age Project (GAP) festival of new works. The company will choose four new plays to be presented as staged readings with professional directors and actors during the GAP festival in February of 2013; the festival will coincide with the company's fully-staged World Premiere of Anthony Clarvoe's OUR PRACTICAL HEAVEN, directed by Allen McKelvey, the third Aurora main stage production to develop from the GAP. Each of the four finalists will receive a $1,000 award and their work will be considered for further development and production during Aurora Theatre Company's regular season; out of town artists will receive travel and accommodation expenses. The submission period opens May 22; deadline for play submission is July 31, 2012. Finalists will be announced in early December 2012.

The annual season of new plays at Summer Works is presented the Obie Award-winning theater company Clubbed Thumb -- has announced complete casting for its 17th season running May 26 to June 30 at the HERE Arts Center (145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick Street) in Manhattan.

New York Stage and Film (Johanna Pfaelzer, Artistic Director; Thomas Pearson, Executive Director, Mark Linn-Baker, Max Mayer, Leslie Urdang, Producing Directors) and Vassar College (Ed Cheetham, Producing Director) have announced the line-up of their 2012 Powerhouse Theater season. The full season is as follows:

New York Stage and Film and Vassar College have announced the line-up of their 2012 Powerhouse Theater season. Season highlights will include:

Central Square Theater and its resident companies, The Nora Theatre Company and Underground Railway Theater, have announced their 2012-2013, and 5th anniversary, season.

The Live-Stream of Lark Play Development Center's grand opening begins tonight, April 26 @ 6:30pm (EST). Go to www.larktheatre.org/GO.html to follow along with the festivies, or follow Lark on Twitter with the hashtag #LarkGO.

Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright whose most recent play every tongue confess premiered at Arena Stage starring Phylicia Rashad and directed by Kenny Leon. It was nominated for the Steinberg New Play Award and the Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding new play. His musical, ON THE LEVEE premiered last summer at Lincoln Center and was nominated for 11 Audelco Awards including outstanding playwright. Last Spring, his play AND JESUS MOONWALKS THE MISSISSIPPI was produced at the Cutting Ball Theater and received the SF Bay Area Theater Critics circle Award nomination for outstanding new play. He has had six plays produced including: DANCE OF THE HOLY GHOST at Yale Repertory Theatre (now under a Broadway option,) (L)IMITATIONS OF LIFE, at the Empty Space and LIKE SUN FALLIN' IN THE MOUTH at the National Black Theatre Festival. He is the recipient of the Hellen Merrill Award, a Kellsering Honoree, the Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship, and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School and is a member of New Dramatists, The Dramatists Guild and the Lark Play Development Center.

The Lark today announced the grand opening of the Lark Play Development Center, located at 311 West 43rd Street.

Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre have received a transformational $18 million gift from the Robina Foundation that will permanently endow the creation of new plays and musicals for the American stage through the Binger Center for New Theatre.

Playwrights Foundation and Cultural Services of the Consulate General of France/SF is spear-heading a major new international exchange project, Des Voix...Found In Translation, that supports the translation of vanguard French and American playwrights and promotes their work to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The San Francisco festival will feature translations of new plays by three emerging playwrights working in France today. Plays by Marion Aubert (pink picture), Nathalie Fillion (blue picture), and Samuel Gallet (yellow picture) will be performed in English during a Festival, scheduled from May 25-27, 2012, in a producing partnership with Z Space, a theater located in San Francisco's vibrant, cutting-edge Mission District and Deborah Taylor/FireMused Productions, LLC.

This July, 40 of the nation's most prominent and promising writers, directors, and composers will be in residence at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in a new laboratory for collaboration. Today, the renowned nonprofit announced 13 selections for the inaugural summer lab at The Ground Floor, Berkeley Rep's Center for the Creation and Development of New Work. During an intense four-week period, dozens of artists will live, dine, create, and collaborate at the Theatre's new campus in West Berkeley.

Artistic Director Chay Yew and Executive Director Jan Kallish announce the appointment of the new Victory Gardens Ensemble Playwrights: Philip Dawkins, Marcus Gardley, Samuel D. Hunter and Tanya Saracho.

The Lark, founded in 1994 as a laboratory for new voices and new ideas, is proud to announce the grand opening of the Lark Play Development Center, located at 311 West 43rd Street. To celebrate the addition of this new artistic center to the theater district, a Grand Opening event, organized by award-winning producer Bruce Cohen (American Beauty, Milk), will take place on Thursday, April 26, 2012 beginning at 7:00 p.m.

Artistic Director Chay Yew and Executive Director Jan Kallish announce the 2012-2013 Victory Gardens season. The season will include Equivocation by Bill Cain, directed by Sean Graney; Failure: A Love Story by Phillip Dawkins, directed by Seth Bockley; Disconnect by Anupama Chandrasekhar, directed by Dexter Bullard; The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Joanie Schultz; and Chicago is Burning by Marcus Gardley, directed by Chay Yew.

Keen Teens, the educational theatre partnership between Off-Broadway's Keen Company and the publishing company Playscripts, Inc. has selected the writers for the program's sixth season. Michael Mitnick, Janine Nabers, and Kathryn Walat have been commissioned to write thirty minute, large cast plays, which will be produced with student actors Off-Broadway in May 2012.

The Arena Stage Board of Trustees has announced that it has renewed the contracts of Artistic Director Molly Smith and Managing Director Edgar Dobie for five additional years with the theater.

The African American experience is not represented solely by one voice or one style. For the third year in a row Horse Trade Theater Group will present The Fire This Time Festival, providing a platform for talented early-career playwrights of African and African-American descent to explore new voices, styles, and challenging new directions for 21st century performing arts in order to move beyond common misconceptions of what's possible in 'black theater.'

Playwrights Foundation (PF) today announced the second annual SF One-Minute Play Festival (SF OMPF), a two-day event on December 17 & 18, 2011 showcasing the talents of 32 Bay Area playwrights, along with the region's leading directors and actors.