First Annual Playwright's Festival Announces Winners

Barnstable Comedy Club is excited to announce the winners of its First Annual Playwright's Festival held last fall. A total of twelve plays were featured as readings, written by playwrights from throughout the New England region. From those plays, two have been selected to return to the theater for a workshop session this spring.

"All of the works presented during the festival were impressive," said event organizer and theater board member Katie Beatty Goers. "However, two stood out as being ready for the next phase of their development."

The selected winners are The House of Nunzio by Patrick Riviere and Dreamsville by Susan Lumenello.

Each play will have a month of preparation with an assigned director and auditioned actors which will culminate in a workshop providing the playwrights the opportunity to fine-tune their pieces for hopeful future production.

The House of Nunzio has had a long history of development with readings and staged readings at Manhattan Theatre Club Studios, The Davenport Theater and Outermost Performing Arts Center. An earlier version of the play received a developmental workshop at Manhattan Theatre Source. The play was named a semi-finalist for the Twenty-Sixth Annual Mildred and Albert Panowski Playwriting Award, The 2003 Mill Mountain Theatre New Play Competition and the 2016 Road Theatre Summer Playwrights Festival.

Susan Lumenello was raised in South Yarmouth and now lives in Boston. Along with her full-length play Dreamsville, her one-act play BUZZ was performed at the Boston Theater Marathon, her one-act The Annoying Minstrels was performed at the Cotuit Center for the Arts and her full-length comedy Easy to Love was given a staged reading at the Provincetown Theatre.

Patrick Riviere has also written A Flower In Autumn (World Premiere in Chicago at Café Voltaire), The Days After (Reading at the WOMR Davis Room in Provincetown), and his ten-minute play I'm a Universalist was selected by Jen Whiting for her Ten-Minute Play Workshop. In addition he has written and adapted numerous children's stories including a Ten-Minute adaptation of A Christmas Carol entitled Old Mr. Scrooge, which was published in 2007, Wally the Wellfleet Oyster, which debuted in 2019 at The Larry Phillips Performance Pavilion - Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater and many of his educational program stories from PIE Story Theatre that have been presented all over the country. He is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

Please visit Barnstable Comedy Club at https://www.barnstablecomedyclub.org