The Lark Announces Selections For 17TH ANNUAL PLAYWRIGHTS' WEEK 10/18-23

The Lark Play Development Center is proud to announce the selections for Playwrights' Week 2010. Eight plays were chosen from over 500 submissions. The playwrights will spend a weeklong residency at the Lark developing their work with professional actors, a director, and Lark staff; each will then present that work as a public reading October 18 - 23.

This year's selections are:
THE LAST PAIR OF EARLIES by Joshua Allen - A young couple migrates from rural Mississippi to Chicago, where the collision of their dreams with reality threatens to destroy their marriage.

CLEMENTINE IN THE LOWER NINE by Dan Dietz - A Lower Ninth Ward family struggles to rebuild their home, and escape their troubled past, in this blues-infused story, adapted from Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

MILVOTCHKEE, VISCONSIN by Laura Jacqmin - Molly has a hole in her head. Will she be able to fill it before everything that she remembers - and everything that makes her who she is - trickles out and away?

TRANSIT by Kait Kerrigan - A small town newscaster seizes her opportunity for a big break when an unidentified Muslim woman jumps in front of a commuter train and dies.

FLOODPLAINS by Gabe McKinley - When Private Lily Johnson mysteriously disappears from duty in Iraq, her father and brother in Missouri are forced to battle each other, the Army and the rising river.

BETHANY by Laura Marks - In an American suburb wiped out by foreclosures, Crystal, a young saleswoman, discovers how far she'll have to go in order to survive.

SPACEBAR: A BROADWAY PLAY BY KYLE SUGARMAN by Michael Mitnick - Kyle is 15 and on a mission: he is convinced he has written the single, best play in the history of the Universe - and he won't stop until Broadway realizes it.

GIRLS IN THE Eddy by Stacy O'Neill - In a laundromat in Florida, 17-year-old Chrissy Ford has been washing her clothes every day for weeks only to discover she's not the only one trying to make a clean break.

Plays developed at the Lark regularly go on to full productions at theaters across the globe. This past year Katori Hall's THE MOUNTAINTOP played London's West End and will appear on Broadway in fall 2010, Lloyd Suh's AMERICAN HWANGAP was produced by the Magic Theatre, Ma-Yi & Play Company, and will be produced in Manila, Philippines this month, and Rajiv Joseph's BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO premiered at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

For more information on Playwrights' Week, visit: www.larktheatre.org.

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 and Managing Director, Michael Robertson.