Alabama Shakespeare Festival Embarks on STATE OF THE SOUTH Tour
The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is sponsoring a 10-day speaking and listening tour of the southeastern United States, July 7-17, 2018. The tour, titled the State of the South, has been developed to invigorate ASF's prestigious Southern Writers' Project, a program founded in 1991 at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival to commission and develop new plays by Southern playwrights.
Artistic Director Rick Dildine has curated a diverse group of Southern playwrights whose work reflects the ever-evolving face of the South. The tour will make stops in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee to meet with residents in towns of all sizes. Through one-on-one interviews, group story circles, and town halls, the State of the South creative team seeks to answer:
Who is the South?
What is the South?
Where is the South?
"The face of the American South is changing, and with those changes comes the opportunity to reassess how we define Southern identity," said Dildine. "That is why the Alabama Shakespeare Festival is sponsoring this tour of the Southeast. The goal is to better understand the state of the South and its people and to hear stories of what life in the South is like today."
The playwrights on tour include Mobile native Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, author of more than 11 plays, including Gee's Bend, and winner of the prestigious American Theatre Critics' Association Award. Most recently, Elyzabeth's play Everything That's Beautiful premiered at the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. The Baltimore Center Stage recently commissioned Elyzabeth to write a play for the acclaimed My America, Too project. Elyzabeth is a graduate of the dramatic writing program at New York University, where she was a Tisch Dramatic Writing Fellow. She teaches at Sewanee: The University of the South where she was the Tennessee Williams Playwright in Residence from 2012-2015. Find more information about Elyzabeth at wilderwriting.net.
Atlanta-based playwright and director Addae Moon is an artistic associate with Found Stages Theatre and a resident playwright with Maat Productions of Afrikan Centered Theatre (MPAACT) based in Chicago, IL. He received the 2015 International Ibsen Award for his dramaturgical work on the project Master Comic and the 2014 John Lipsky Award from the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL) for his immersive play Four Days of Fury: Atlanta 1906. Addae was also a member of ALLIANCE THEATRE's 2015-2016 Reiser Artists' Lab as co-writer on the immersive project Third Council of Lyons with Found Stages Theatre. Addae received his BA in Theatre Arts from Clark Atlanta University and an MFA in Playwriting from the Professional Playwright's Program at Ohio University.