Lark Play Development Center Announces 2008-9 Playwrights' Workshop Fellows

The Lark Play Development Center has announced the selected playwrights for the 2008-09 Playwrights' Workshop Fellows 2008. This year's writers include Thomas Bradshaw (Southern Promises), Samuel D. Hunter (Lark's 2008 PONY Fellow), Lisa Kron (pictured; Well), Deirdre O'Connor (Hero), and Playwright-in-Residence Arthur Kopit (Lark Playwright Advisor).

Playwrights' Workshop brings together established, emerging, and mid-career writers to create a rigorous yet flexible environment for sharing and discussing each other's work. This program supports a community of self-guided professionals who desire creative connection and peer relationships as part of their creative process. Highly competitive, playwrights included in this program are nominated for inclusion in the Workshop by the Lark's esteemed pool of Playwright Advisors, artistic directors at regional theatres, and members of the Lark leadership team. Fellows participate in bi-weekly sessions over an eight-month period and present new work developed in the workshop in public readings. Chairing this year's workshop will be Lark Playwright Advisor David Henry Hwang (Yellow Face).

Past workshop fellows include: Jason Grote, who developed Box Americana in the Workshop, which was read at Playwrights Horizons; Anton Dudley who developed his play Substitution, which was then produced by The Playwrights Realm at Soho Playhouse; Katori Hall who's The Mountaintop has been read at Juilliard and Primary Stages; and Rachel Axler, who's Workshop-developed play Smudge will be produced by Manhattan Theater Club in 2008-09. Last year's Playwright-in-Residence was Tina Howe.

A laboratory for new voices and new ideas, the LARK PLAY DEVELOPMENT CENTER provides playwrights with indispensable resources to develop their work. The Lark brings together actors, directors, playwrights and the community to allow writers to learn about their own work by seeing and hearing it, and by receiving feedback from a dedicated and supportive community. The company reaches into untapped local populations and across international boundaries to seek out and embrace unheard voices and diverse perspectives, celebrating differences in language and worldviews. The Lark also plays a leading role in advancing unknown writers and their works to audiences through carefully stewarded partnerships with a host of theaters, universities, community-based organizations, and NGOs, locally, nationally and globally. The Lark is led by Producing Director, John Clinton Eisner, Managing Director, Michael Robertson, and Artistic Program Director, Megan Monaghan. For more information, www.larktheatre.org.

Thomas Bradshaw - His newest play Dawn will Premiere at The Flea Theater on November 9th directed by Jim Simpson. His play Southern Promises premiered at Performance Space 122 in September. His play entitled Purity was produced at Performance Space 122 in January 2007 and his plays Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist and Cleansed were produced on a double bill at The Brick Theatre in February '07. His plays Prophet, Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist, Cleansed, and Purity are all published by Samuel French, Inc. Strom/Cleansed were nominated for Outstanding Original Full Length Script by the New York Innovative Theater Awards in 2007. He has been featured as one of Time Out New York's ten playwrights to watch, as one of Paper Magazine's 2006 Beautiful People, and Best Provocative Playwright by the Village Voice in 2007. His play entitled Prophet was presented at P.S. 122 in December 2005 . He was a fellow at New York Theater Workshop in 2006-07' and is now a Usual Suspect. Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist was produced in Los Angeles in June 2008' and Thomas's play Dawn received a workshop with New York Theater Workshop at Dartmouth College in August. Dawn has been translated into German and was presented at Theater Bielefeld in Germany in October. His play Purity was published by Theaterheute in Germany in April and his play Dawn was published by Theater Der Zeit in October. He is currently working on an adaptation of The Book Of Job which has been commissioned by Soho Rep. He is also Soho Rep's 2008-2009 Streslin Fellow.

Samuel D. Hunter (Lark's PONY Fellow) is originally from Moscow, Idaho. He received his BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2004, an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop in 2007, and is currently a playwright-in-residence at the Juilliard School. Most recently, Sam was awarded the 2008-2009 Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship from the Lark Play Development Center. His plays include: I am Montana at the 2008 Ojai Playwrights Conference, 2008 Juilliard New Play Festival, 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the 2007 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, Norman Rockwell Killed My Father at the 2005 O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Abraham (A Shot in the Head) at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Abraham (I am an Island) in Studio 42's Scattered Festival at Collective: Unconscious, Pigheart at the 2007 Iowa New Play Festival, and his newest play, Idaho / Dead Idaho, which recently received its first reading at Juilliard, and will have a reading in September at Ars Nova as part of their Out Loud reading series. Sam has taught at the University of Iowa, Fordham University, and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories at Ashtar Theater (Ramallah) and Ayyam al-Masrah (Hebron). He lives in New York with his partner, dramaturg John Baker.

Arthur Kopit is the author of: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad; Indians (Tony Nominee, Finalist for Pulitzer Prize); Wings (Tony Nominee, Finalist for Pulitzer Prize); a new translation of Ibsen's Ghosts; the book for the musical Nine (based on Fellini's 8 '), music and lyrics by Maury Yeston (Tony Award for Best Musical, 1982 and Tony Award for Best Musical revival, 2003), and about to start filming, with Rob Marshall directing and Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido); End of the World with Symposium to Follow; the book for the musical Phantom; the book for the musical High Society; Road to Nirvana; BecauseHeCan (originally entitled Y2K); Chad Curtiss, Lost Again, and numerous one act plays. Current PROJECTS include Discovery of America, a play based on the account of the Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, and two plays about memory, one called Autumn Light, the other with the Working Title, The Incurables. AS A TEACHER: Mr. Kopit has taught playwriting at the Rita and Burton Goldberg Graduate Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU, Yale School of Drama, Yale College, Columbia University, Harvard, CCNY, Hunter College, Princeton, and, this past spring, at Denison University, where he was Jonathan Reynolds Playwright-in-Residence. Mr. Kopit is a member of the Writers Guild of America, the Dramatists Guild, the Dramatists Guild Council, and The Lark Play Development Center, where he heads The Lark Playwrights' Workshop. He lives in New York.

Lisa Kron has been writing and performing theater since coming to New York from Michigan in 1984. Her play Well opened on Broadway at the Longacre Theater in March 2006, receiving two Tony nominations. It premiered at The Public Theater in 2004 and was listed among the year's best plays by the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Newark Star Ledger, Backstage, the Advocate, and is included in the anthology, 'Best Plays of 2004-2005.' 2.5 Minute Ride (Obie Award, Drama Desk nom., GLAAD Award) premiered and at The Public Theater in 1999 and has been presented all over the world at theaters including the London Barbican, and Japan's Rinkogun. Other plays include 101 Humiliating Stories (P.S. 122, Lincoln Center, Drama Desk Nomination), Charity and Montecore (2006 Humana Festival, New York Fringe), and 43/13 (Dad's Garage, Atlanta). Kron is a founding member of the OBIE and Bessie Award'winning theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers. Fellowships/Grants include: Lortel and Guggenheim Foundations, NEA/TCG, Cal Arts/Alpert Award, Creative Capital Foundation, NYFA. Projects in the works include Five Questions for Center Theater Group, a musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, as well as new plays for the Sloan Foundation through Playwrights Horizons and for Drew University.

Deirdre O'Connor's productions include Hero (Naked Angels, Armed and Naked in America), The Death of May McAllister (Northeastern University), Penicillin (Naked Angels, The Mag 7), White Jesus (Naked Angels, Democracy Project), The Attic (St Ann's Warehouse, Labapalooza), and Wednesday (Naked Angels, Fear). Deirdre was a 2008 Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellow mentored by Michael Weller. Her play Jailbait will be produced by The Cherry Lane Theatre in 2009. She is a graduate of Hampshire College, and Columbia University's MFA Playwriting program where she received the John Golden Playwriting Award. Deirdre writes for 'The Electric Company' which will begin airing on PBS in January 2009. She is a member of the Naked Angels Writers Group and Teaching Artist for the Roundabout Theatre Company.

Photo credit: Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

 

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