Baltimore Playwrights Festival Announce Play-reading Marathon for 3/24

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival has announced a public play-reading marathon to take place on Saturday, March 24th, at Fells Point Corner Theatre.

Beginning at 11:00 a.m. plays to be read are I Love My Wife but Oh You Kid by Ray Hamby, followed at 1:00 p.m. by Room 101 - The play by Melaki King, and The Amendment by Amy Bernstein at 3:00 p.m. After each reading there will be a discussion of the script with the playwright, director and actors. The event is free, and the general public is encouraged to attend.

I Love My Wife, but Oh, You Kid, by Ray Hamby, is a wild farce showcasing the back- and on-stage antics of a third-rate theatrical company treading the boards of the Albee Theater in 1925 Kansas City. The machinations of slightly mature leading lady Bess, her actor husband Delbert, the handsome leading man Wesley and Angel, the ingénue, feature love, requited and not, blackmail, murder plots, and revenge, all against a backdrop of zany, melodramatic, Tom-‘n-Jerry-style action.

At age 89, Ray Hamby can’t quite stop writing. He wrote his first play at the age 10, and had his first play published at the age 17. When the check arrived, he declared himself a playwright and has not looked back. He has written over 30 full-length plays, and had productions all over the country, including in Alaska, as well as in Canada and Italy. He served 25 years as Executive Director of the MDDC Press Association, has been a university professor, and has owned his own theater.

Room 101, by Melaki King, is about five high school children in a classroom that collectively discuss all the changes and problems in their lives. It is a form of group therapy, without a professional therapist. They indirectly help each other while discussing their own problems, letting the others gain the knowledge that they are not alone.

Melaki King, a young upcoming playwright/director from Baltimore, has been working with professional theaters since high school. While directing a drama club consisting of Baltimore City Public School students, he directed such plays as Romeo & Juliet Hip-Hop Tragedy, A Raisin In The Sun, and A Christmas Play. He has worked with Rosiland Cauthen of Center Stage, and as the Technical Director of the Kuumber Theater Company from 2008 to 2011. He currently teaches theater and dance to children at the James McHenry Recreation Center.

Gregory Grey, the protagonist of The Amendment by Amy Bernstein, is a talk-radio jockey and zealous guardian of the First Amendment. He’s convinced that his anything-goes program is the best way to defend free speech. His devotion to the cause turns dangerous, and his world begins to fall apart, when a wealthy, scandal-ridden politician lambasted on his program commits suicide, and Gregory defends the outspoken hecklers who show up to protest at her funeral.

Amy Bernstein is a long-time nonfiction writer—an award-winning journalist, executive speechwriter, public radio reporter, book author, and lots of stuff in between. But over the last two years, playwrighting scratches her real itch, with short plays and one-acts produced, professionally read, or with planned productions at, among other locations, Glass Mind Theater and Fells Point Corner Theater in Baltimore, the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival in Washington, D.C., Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and the International Gone in 60 Seconds One-Minute Playwrighting Festival in Leeds, England.

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival has presented 273 scripts by 165 playwrights, produced by 25 different companies, over the past 30 Years. Our mission is to provide an environment that nurtures the talents of Maryland and DC playwrights through public readings, discussions, critiques and workshopping of new plays. Our summer season is devoted to the presentation of these newly developed works to area audiences in cooperation with local area theaters. Further information can be found at www.baltplayfest.org.

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