15th Annual Maine Playwrights Festival to Kick Off 4/30

Acorn Productions, a non-profit organization dedicated to nurturing and developing Southern Maine's community of performing artists, announces the final performance schedule for this year's Maine Playwrights Festival. The MPF opens with an evening of dramatic readings on Saturday, April 30, in the Ballroom at Mechanics Hall, and continues with a weekend of performances at the St. Lawrence Arts Center from May 4 to 7. The event wraps up with the 24-Hour Portland Theater Project on Sunday, May 8th, a popular presentation of 6 new plays that all share the same line of dialogue, prop, and setting, all of which have been written, rehearsed and presented within a single day. Tickets for the MPF are available on Acorn's website at www.acorn-productions.org and cost $16 for the general public and $14 for students and seniors.

Due perhaps to the volatility of events in that region of the world, this year's MPF features three scripts that dramatize characters and/or situations from the Middle East. These plays are joined by three scripts that bring to life stories of reuniting families, two romantic comedies, a one-act that explores gender identity in New Hampshire during the late nineteenth century, and a humorous depiction of college students turning into superheroes. This year's MPF also features Playwright-in-Residence William Donnelly, who taught a Master Playwrighting Class at MECA in March, and who has been working with the playwrights on their revisions during the rehearsal process. He will be conducting a public talkback after Opening Night on Wednesday, May 4th.

Over its first 14 years the MPF has become Maine's premiere incubator for developing new plays by local playwrights. The MPF's emphasis has always been on providing playwrights with the opportunity to hear their words come to life during a rehearsal process with a professional director and local actors, a process that culminates with fully-staged public performances at the St. Lawrence Arts Center on Munjoy Hill in Portland. This year, Acorn received plays from almost fifty different Maine-based playwrights, a number attesting to Maine's active playwrighting community. A committee of five readers selected the plays for this year's MPF under the co-direction of Daniel Burson and MPF-founder Michael Levine. Since its inception, the MPF has helped generate a number of successful plays that have been produced in other venues around the country and to catalyze a number of other events for local writers.

The MPF showcases not only the talents of many local playwrights, but also the craft of directors and actors from many different theater companies in the area. The playwrights whose work will be featured in the St. Lawrence performances are Devlyn Case, Jr., Carolyn Gage, Jennifer Jensen, Richard Sewell, and David Susman, and they are joined by five playwrights whose scripts will be read at Mechanics Hall: Nicole d'Entremont, Elaine Ford, Jennifer Reck, Erica Thompson, and Bess Welden. The ten MPF plays are directed by Karen Ball, Al D'Andrea,, Odelle Bowman, Michael Levine, and Elizabeth Rollins; they feature a mix of seasoned professional actors as well as students from the Acorn Acting Academy.

The following plays are featured at the St. Lawrence:

MEET THE AUTHOR, by David Susman
Romance blooms between a novelist and a reader-until a difference of literary opinion threatens everything.

NERDLORDS VS. THE THING UNDER THE BASEMENT, by Jennifer Jensen
A group of college students discover that they all have supernatural abilities and that there is a monster lurking underneath the campus, and they decide to work together to stop it.

OLIVE SHRINESHADE, by Richard Sewell
It seems Olive asked her daughter to come 420 miles just to open an urn, but was there another reason as well?

PLANCHETTE, by Carolyn Gage
During a nor-easter on the New Hampshire coast in 1879, two fourteen-year olds share their secrets about trauma they have survived and the deeper secrets about their sexual orientation and gender identities.

SOMETHING BLUE, by Delvyn Case
How can a Palestinian woman living in Gaza, separated by her fiancé living in the West Bank since their engagement three years ago and unable to get permission to travel to the West Bank for the wedding, be united with the love of her life?

Additionally, the following plays will be read at Mechanics Hall:

HOW THINGS SOMETIMES WORK OUT, by Jennifer Reck
Two people meet, fall in love, get married, start a family and divorce - in ten minutes.

INSURRECTIONS, by Nicole d'Entremont
Ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations find themselves forced to make decisions that cause later reflections.

ORIGINAL BRASSES, FINE PATINA, by Elaine Ford
A couple who parted in anger more than a half century ago revisit the past, reveal some secrets, and discover the person each has become 53 years later.

WHATEVER YOU DECIDE, by Bess Welden
Fiercely independent American photojournalist Jamie Winter meets refugee kids all the time, but when Waleed, a shoeless, motherless teenager steps off the boat and in front of her lens, she is suddenly forced to confront her own cultural identity, family history, complicated past relationship, and undeniable compulsion to become the boys rescuer.

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