The Chimes & More Announced For 2009 Summer Play Festival 7/7-8/2
By: Gabrielle Sierra Apr. 23, 2009
Eight productions have been announced for the eagerly anticipated 2009 Summer Play Festival (SPF).
For its upcoming season, SPF will again be presented at The Public Theater. SPF 2009 will run from July 7 to August 2 and, as in years past, is expected to serve as a highlight of the summer theatre season by showcasing a line-up of new talent. Tickets for SPF 2009 will go on sale on June 1. For more information go to www.spfnyc.com
Selected from more than 1400 submissions, the 7 plays and one musical are from the United States, UK and Australia.Summer Play Festival 2009 Season:The ChimesBy Kevin Christopher SnipesDeparture Lounge
by Dougal IrvineThe Happy Sad
by Ken UrbanReborning
by Zayd DohrnThe Sacrifices
by Alena SmithTender
by Nicki BloomWe Declare You a Terrorist
by Tim J. LordWhore
by Rick ViedeFounded in 2004 by Broadway producer Arielle Tepper Madover (Mary Stuart, Monty Python's SPAMALOT, Frost/Nixon, The Pillowman and A Raisin in the Sun), the Summer Play Festival (SPF) stages original new plays and musicals by emerging writers during the summer months in New York City. In 2005, the not-for-profit The Living Room for Artists, Inc. was formed to ensure that the Festival perpetuates its goals and whose central mission is to both fuel the growth of emerging theatre artists and encourage people of all ages to create, attend and work in the theatre.
by Kevin Christopher Snipes
Nick returns to his New England boarding school still haunted by choices he made 40 years ago. The past overwhelms the present as this thrilling drama flashes back to four young pranksters drawn together by their knack for Shakespeare and ripped apart by the onset of World War II.
Kevin Christopher Snipes is a playwright/screenwriter living in New York. His plays include A Bitter Taste, The Chimes, Small Gods, Beautiful World, Party Lights and Hip-Skidoo. His work has been performed at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Orlando Shakespeare, Bailiwick Repertory, New York Stage & Film, The Gallery Players, Moving Arts, and the Hippodrome State Theatre (Fl). His one-act Virgin Rock was published in The Best Plays of the Riant Strawberry One-Act Festival: Volume 3. Kevin is the recipient of a 2008 Artists Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Larry Corse International Prize for Playwriting, and an Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Fellowship. He has also been a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, the O'Neill Conference, Sundance Screenwriter's Lab and the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship. He holds a MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was part of a team of writers and scientists who built Valerie, the world's first storytelling robot receptionist. As a director Kevin has staged readings of new works by playwrights Matt Schatz, Kirby Fields and Julie Leedes. Memberships: the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group and the Dramatists Guild.
Departure Lounge
by Dougal Irvine
It's the end of vacation as four guys wait for their flight home in this testosterone-driven new musical. With time to kill they recount the hilarious antics of the week, and as secrets tumble out we learn more about the lads than they know about themselves.
Dougal Irvine gained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Birmingham, before training as an actor at Mountview Academy. He has worked as an actor for seven years, with many West End and Rep theatre credits, as well as work in TV and Film. He trained in playwriting at the Royal Court, London. His first musical Departure Lounge was nominated for all five MTM:UK awards at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival and won the award for best music. His second musical Get In Touch is being developed through the Perfect Pitch network. Dougal also wrote the screenplays for the short films Beautiful Eyes and Blind Date which both went to Cannes, and The Green Fairy for the LA short film festival.
The Happy Sad
by Ken Urban
Finding love is easy. Defining love is not. New York City provides the backdrop to a contemporary comedy of sex, love and dating in a city where there are too many options and not enough time.
Ken Urban's plays have been produced at The Flea, Moving Arts, Target Margin, Theatre of NOTE, Rude Guerrilla, The Mill @ Stage Left, and The Chocolate Factory. His work has been developed at Playwrights Horizons, The Huntington, Son of Semele Ensemble, Urban Stages, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Soho Rep and Annex Theatre. Ken is the recipient of the prestigious L. Arnold Weissberger Prize from the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, a Playwriting Fellowship from the Huntington Theatre in Boston, a MacDowell Residency, a Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the winner of the Moving Arts Premiere One Act Competition. His plays include I (HEART) KANT, Nibbler, Halo, The Absence of Weather, The Private Lives of Eskimos, The Female Terrorist Project, and The Happy Sad. His work is published in the anthologies New York Theatre Review and Plays and Playwrights 2002. A number of his plays are available in acting editions from Original Works Publishing and he is featured in numerous monologue and scene compilations. Ken founded The Committee, a New York-based theatre company that produces "catastrophic theatre." In addition to directing his own work, he has directed plays by Sarah Kane, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams. He is a graduate of Bucknell University and Rutgers University. He currently teaches theatre and playwriting at Harvard University. His play Nibbler opens at Theatre of NOTE in Los Angeles in November. He sings and plays electronics in the Boston band The Avon Barksdale, and makes electronic music as Occurrence. Visit him at www.kenurban.org.Reborning
by Zayd Dohrn
Art and life become disturbingly interchangeable when a sculptor of baby dolls meets a woman desperate to recreate the past. This dark comedy takes an unsettling look at work, latex, and the power of creation.
Zayd Dohrn's plays, including Sick, Magic Forest Farm, and Reborning, have been produced and developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, The Berkshire Theatre Festival, Marin Theatre Company, South Coast Repertory, Magic Theatre, Southern Rep, Alchemy Theatre, Kitchen Dog, and Woolly Mammoth, among others. He is a recipient of Lincoln Center's Lecomte du Nouy Prize, the Sky Cooper Prize, the Jean Kennedy Smith Award, an IRNE for Best New Play, and residencies with Ars Nova, Chautauqua, and the Royal Court Theatre of London. He received his MFA from NYU and was a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at Juilliard.The Sacrifices
by Alena Smith
At first glance the family has everything. But once they leave on a Caribbean cruise, the winds change, privilege becomes a prison, and their vacation will be anything but smooth sailing in this touching comedy drama.
Alena Smith is a member of the 2009 Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater and is a 2008-09 Artists Fellow in Playwriting with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). The Sacrifices is her newest play; before being selected by SPF, it was given a staged reading at Playwrights Horizons. Her play The Lacy Project was most recently produced at the American Repertory Theatre's A.R.T. Institute (Cambridge, MA). Lacy was previously produced in the 2007 Ice Factory festival at the Ohio Theater (NYC), developed with Soho Think Tank, and was first seen in the 2006 Carlotta Festival of New Plays at the Yale School of Drama. Other plays include Alice Eat Your Words (Yale Cabaret, Northwestern University, Haverford College), It or Her (Philly Live Arts, Brown University), Apple of Discord (Philly Fringe), and Saturnalia in Poughkeepsie. She is a cofounder and the resident playwright of Dead Genius Productions, an independent dance-theater company whose most recent work was presented by Chashama in Riverside Park. Alena has been a finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference and the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, and was nominated by the Public Theater for the Old Vic New Voices US/UK Exchange. MFA, 2006, Yale School of Drama; ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting.Tender
by Nicki Bloom
A random act of violence leaves a family shattered and searching for a way to be whole again. Amid the ramifications, mystery, memory and potential murder set the stage for this haunting drama about love, loss and grief.
Nicki Bloom is a poet, playwright and novelist. Her first play Tender was produced by nowyesnow in 2007 as part of the Belvoir Street B-Sharp season in Sydney. This production then toured to Hothouse Theatre (Albury/Wodonga) and Griffin Theatre (Sydney) in late 2008. Tender is published by Currency Press. Her adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts was produced by the State Theatre Company of South Australia in October 2008, and is published by Phoenix Press. Nicki's awards include the 2006 Adrian Consett Stephen Memorial Prize (Tender), the 2007 Inscription Chairman's Award for Best Play (Tender), the 2009 Inscription Playwriting Award (Bloodwood) and the 2006 Henry Lawson Prize for Prose, for Something Greater Than All of This, a fragment of her debut novel An Archipelago. Tender has also been shortlisted for several awards, including the 2008 NSW Premier's Play Award, the 2007 Philip Parsons Playwriting Award and the 2006 Max Afford Playwriting Award. Nicki was a panellist at the 2007 Emerging Writers' Festival (Melbourne), a 2008 resident writer at Griffin Theatre Company (Sydney) and the recipient of a Goethe-Institut scholarship to ‘Theatertreffen' (Berlin) in May 2009. Nicki is currently under commission from several leading Australian theatre companies including Company B Belvoir, Griffin Theatre Company and Brink Productions. She is co-artistic director of performance company nowyesnow.
We Declare You a Terrorist
by Tim J. Lord
Eight hundred civilians are taken hostage during the performance of a hit Moscow musical. In the aftermath, the playwright is plagued by the story of his captor-a young woman willing to die for her cause-in an intense drama where one person's patriotism is another's act of terrorism.
Tim J. Lord A native of the prairies and (mostly) suburbs of the Midwest, Tim J. Lord currently lives in New York. We Declare You A Terrorist received a reading at the Public Theater this past January and will be a part of the New Harmony Project this May after beginning its life as a long collaboration with director West Hyler that culminated in a production at HERE Arts Center's 2007 American Living Room Festival. Tim's plays have been developed and produced at Spring Theatreworks, Rude Mechanicals (Austin, TX), 15 Head, HotCity Theatre, and Stanford University/Kennedy Center's University Playwrights Workshop. His ten minute play Montana Lovesong was a finalist for the 2007 Heidemann Award and was performed at Actors Theater of Louisville for their Actor Apprentice Showcase in January 2008. He is currently at work on an adaptation on The Bacchae with director Jerry Ruiz. Other plays include: Fault & Fold, The View from Mt. Langley, The Secret History of Caleb Caan, Peloponnesus, Santa Ana Winds, 11 Hills of San Francisco, Better Homes & Homelands, and G-Men!. Tim studied with Paula Vogel while a resident of Providence and is a graduate of the MFA playwriting program at the University of California, San Diego. Whoreby Rick Viede
Sara just wants to be interesting, and an unexpected one-night stand propels her into a high stakes relationship with worldly Tim. As they are drawn into the fringes this thriller exposes a world of greed, lies and fear which threatens to break the rules that hold them together.
Rick Viede is an Australian writer and performer. He won the prestigious 2008 Griffin Award for his debut play Whore, which will premiere at Belvoir St Theatre this year, closely followed by a New York production. In 2008 he was an Affiliate Playwright with Griffin Theatre Company working on two commissions: Autumn and Poised; and he has recently been commissioned to write a new play for Bell Shakespeare Company. He has been shortlisted for numerous awards and won the Shaw Prize for essays. Rick also created the satiric American character of Glace Chase that has played to critical acclaim throughout Australia including seasons at Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre, Melbourne Comedy Festival, Mardi Gras Festival, The Butterfly Club and Feast Festival. Glace has his own television show in development. Rick holds a B.A. from Monash University and is currently completing a Graduate Diploma in Screenwriting at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS).
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