Actors' Theatre Grand Rapids to Workshop New Play by Betsy Howie

Actors' Theatre has announced the first script workshop for the 2015-2016 season! This coming July, Actors' will be hosting nationally-recognized playwright, actress, and author Betsy Howie for a two week script workshop of her latest work, Stella Remembered. Betsy will be joined by Emmy Award-winning screenwriter/producer Rodney Vaccaro as director, actors Joyce Bean, Lynne Brown-Tepper, Neil Patrick Trevisan, Ruth Ann Molenaar and Kyle Los, and producer Kathy Keehn. For eight days the team will read and work through the script allowing Betsy to make revisions. On July 23 and 24 there will be public staged readings.

Workshopping a play is as crucial as the initial writing. In a workshop, a director and group of actors begin exploring characters' backstories and journeys and finding the works dramatic arcs. Much of a play exists unwritten - subtext that is not drawn out until a play takes physical form through the eyes, ears, and minds of directors and actors. It is very much an organic symbiotic relationship between author, director, and actors. Nuances in characters and story are discovered offering an end product that is more rich and full than the initial script. Workshopping often includes staged readings (as Actors' is doing) which is a performance of the script-in-process minus some theatrical elements (such as costumes, sets, etc). This allows an author to gauge audience reactions as well as more general critical response.

Stella Remembered Public Staged Readings
July 23-24, 8pm
The theater at 41 Sheldon (ArtPrize/Compass College of Cinematic Arts)
Free admission. Donations to Actors' Theatre accepted

About Stella Remembered
Taking from Betsy's personal experience as acclaimed acting teacher Stella Adler's personal assistant, Stella Remembered is a history in theatre, a memory of ambition, an obsession with betrayal and delusion, and the struggle to determine which is which, whether any of it matters, and if there is any point in finding the way back to where it all began.

About Betsy
BETSY HOWIE studied at The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting through NYU where she earned her BFA in Acting. Directly following her time as a student of Adler, she was hired by Adler herself as a live-in Secretary. Living and working with the "larger than life" Adler, allowed a much fuller understanding the legendary teacher's acting technique-developed as a result of Adler's direct dealings with Stanislavsky.

Despite Stella's chronic prediction that Howie would never be an actress, Betsy has performed extensively in New York and regionally, (including the role of Mo in the Off-Broadway hit musical, Cowgirls, which she co-authored.) She has been seen in numerous television commercials and her commentaries heard on NPR.

Cowgirls enjoyed a year-long run at the Minetta Lane Theatre and continues to be produced regionally almost 20 years later. Her play, Callie's Tally, derived from her memoir of the same title, was in rehearsal for its premiere at Southern Rep in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. Over the next year, readings of the script were performed nationwide at some of the country's most prestigious theatres (Guthrie, Cleveland Playhouse) to raise money for the theatres of New Orleans. A full production was finally mounted at Southern Rep on the first anniversary of the storm. It subsequently played regionally including a staged reading at New York Stage and Film.

In addition to playwriting, she is a published novelist (Snow/Harcourt Brace), memoirist (Callie's Tally/Tarcher Putnam) and children's author (The Block Mess Monster/MacMillan, Welcome to the Circus Hotel/Hayakawa, The Drama Diaries Series/Scholastic, and more than 80 titles under the pen name, Howie Dewin.)

She grew up in Grand Rapids and attended Northview High School.

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