Playwrights Foundation Announces Upcoming Winter Classes in Playwriting

Playwrights Foundation (PF) today announced that Liz Duffy Adams will teach a weekend intensive, The Tao of Playwriting from January 27 - February 5, and Eugenie Chan will teach a 10-week class, Crack That Whip from February 21 - May 1, 2012 at PF's New Play Institute.

About the women: "Both women are multiple PF alumni with solid teaching credentials. These classes will round out PF's winter line up of professional, award winning playwrights who come to teach writers of all levels. NPI classes accept only 12 students per class, with scholarships available to low-income students."

The Tao of Playwriting: The Way of Writing Quickly with Liz Duffy Adams is an intensive workshop that encourages writers to complete a play in four sessions over two weekends. Using the Tao de Ching as a playwriting manual, students will learn how to harness their intellectual and creative instincts in this is a retreat-style, intensive course. Students will seek to balance the intellectual decision-making brain with the wilder anarchic creative instincts, and will use the Tao to inspire and rediscover surprise and enrapturement in their writing, and how to work with their natural impulses while challenging themselves to break out of their ruts.
Begins January 27 and ends on February 5, 2012.

Crack that Whip with Eugenie Chan is a 10-week course that will take students through the conception, execution, and completion of a first draft of a full-length play. Playing with event, memory, sound, rhythm, word, object, person, and more -- students will learn techniques to establish the world of their plays, and then how to employ dramaturgy to further the play's world -- developing character, story, and t logic. The last weeks will be devoted to the exploration of structure, especially to uncovering the rules by which the play plays. Students should expect to romp (metaphorically) in places dark and light, sacred and profane.
Begins February 21 and ends on May 1, 2012.

"These artists return again and again to teach in our New Play Institute because their students clamor for more," says Amy Mueller, Artistic Director of Playwrights Foundation. "Studying with a master writer - at any level, can help writers kick-start their imaginations, as well as learn a new process for developing a work."

About the Instructors
Liz Duffy Adams, the critically acclaimed author of Poodle With Guitar, The Train Play, Dog Act, One Big Lie, The Listener and Or, is known for her whimsical and masterful use of language and historically charged characters. Her work has appeared Off Broadway at The Women's Project and Productions, in the Bay Area at the Magic Theatre, Crowded Fire Theater, Shotgun Players, Cutting Ball Theater, and in numerous regional theatres in the US and Canada. She won the 2005 Will Glickman Award for PF's production of Dog Act with Shotgun Players, and the Lillian Hellman Award for Playwriting in 2010 for her recent play, Or,. She recently completed a prestigious seven-year residency at New Dramatists, and earned her MFA at Yale School of Drama.

Eugenie Chan has recently received acclaim for her adaptation of the Ariadne myth in Bone To Pick and Diadem. Her work has been produced or developed at Playwrights Foundation, The Cutting Ball Theater and the Magic Theatre in SF, The Public Theater and Playwright's Horizons in NYC, and other regional theatres. She is currently enjoying her seven-year residency at New Dramatists in NYC, and recently graduated from PF's Resident Playwrights Initiative. She earned her MFA at Yale School of Drama, and has taught extensively throughout the country.

About the NPI
Nationally acclaimed playwrights and master theater artists offer their experience in intimate classes and workshops at the Institute. PF's Institute is proud to aid students of all levels in rigorously developing their art, to provide a diverse field of teachers and classes, and to provide scholarships to those with low-income. The Institute is a community where both budding and experienced writers can learn from and with each other, laying the foundations for the future of theater.

About Playwrights Foundation
Playwrights Foundation is dedicated to discovering and supporting local and national American Playwrights across a broad spectrum of artistic and career positions, in the inception and development of new plays that speak to and from an increasingly diverse society. Founded on a deeply held belief that the relevance and vitality of American theater depends upon a continual infusion of new work, Playwrights Foundation sustains a commitment to the playwright, who we regard as the creative wellspring of theater.

To post a comment, you must register and login.