Lauren Shouse News

Raven Theatre Company, which will turn 35 years old in March of 2018, announced today that its upcoming 2017-18 season will give Chicago audiences their first looks at plays by three of America's most acclaimed young playwrights.

Is your family more the historical drama - backstage intrigue type -- or the modern British classic type?

Michael Menendian, Producing Artistic Director of Raven Theatre, has announced casting for the company's upcoming production of Betrayal, by Harold Pinter.

Stage Left Theatre is proud to present LeapFest XIII, Stage Left's annual new-play festival, running June 25 – July 31, 2016.  LeapFest features several new plays with socio-political themes, presented as workshop productions in rotating repertory. This year's festival includes new works from Mrinalini Kamath, Shayne Kennedy, Andrew Kramer, and Aline Lathrop

Raven Theatre Company, who has long championed new works through its [Working Title] new play development series of staged readings and its full productions of world premiere plays, will introduce a full weekend of three new play readings this summer. From Friday, July 8 through Sunday, July 10, the company will present a formal reading of a different play each night. The festival will open the evening of Friday, July 8 with a reading of Girl Found, a psychological mystery by Barbara Lhota, an award-winning playwright and network playwright at Chicago Dramatists. The Saturday evening entry will be Sycamore, a drama of contemporary family life by the Brooklyn, New York based Sarah Sander, that will be fully produced at Raven in March and April 2017 as part of its 2016-17 subscription season. Closing out the weekend will be the political drama Armature by Andrew Kramer, an Indianapolis-based writer who has been a resident playwright with StageLeft's LeapFest.

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

For its 2016-17 season, the 33-year-old Raven Theatre Company will again bring new plays and playwrights to Chicago audiences along with revivals of classic and lesser-known works by masters of modern drama. Michael Menendian, producing artistic director, today announced a lineup that includes the early Tennessee Williams play Not About Nightingales and Pinter'sBetrayal as well as the Midwest premieres of Richard Greenberg's recent Broadway hit The Assembled Parties and Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti, one of the U.K.'s most acclaimed new playwrights, and the world premiere of Sycamore - a drama of contemporary family life set in the Midwest by New York-based playwright Sarah Sander.

Northlight Theatre, under the direction of Artistic Director BJ Jones and Executive Director Timothy J. Evans, announces Lauren Shouse as the company's new Literary Manager. Shouse previously served as a dramaturgy consultant for the company in 2015.

Nashville actor and NFL Hall of Famer Eddie George, who makes his Broadway debut Tuesday night in the iconic musical Chicago, was named First Night's Outstanding Leading Actor in a Play for his searing portrayal of a former slave haunted by the spectre of abuse in Nashville Repertory Theatre's The Whipping Man. Rene Dunshee Copeland, producing artistic director of Nashville Rep, was named Outstanding Director of a Play, while her three-actor ensemble (which included James Rudolph and Matthew Rosenbaum) were awarded as First Night's Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play for their rendition of the Matthew Lopez play.

An exciting and incisive script, enacted by an ensemble of Nashville's finest actors under the direction of a confident, focused woman who knows how to make compelling theater come to life with style and aplomb…that's what we've come to expect from Nashville Repertory Theatre over the past thirty-some years. And make no mistake about it: the company's 2015-16 season opener delivers all of that and more with Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn, now onstage at TPAC's Andrew Johnson Theatre through September 19.

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

Saturday night marks the opening of RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN at Nashville Repertory Theatre. This Pulitzer Prize nominated play written by Gina Gionfriddo marks the opening of Nashville Repertory's 2015-2016 season. Director Lauren Shouse took some time out of her busy tech week to answer a few questions for us about this production of RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN.

Nashville Repertory Theatre opens its 2015-16 season with the Pultizer Prize-nominated contemporary play Rapture, Blister, Burn, running tonight, September 3, and playing through September 19, 2015 in Johnson Theater at Tennessee Performing Arts Center. 

Stage Left Theatre announces the recipients of the Downstage Left Playwright Residencies for Season 34. Residencies are designed to help playwrights take a project from the conceptual stage all the way to a production-ready script. Playwrights work closely with ensemble directors and members of the literary team to design a process tailored for the particular needs of their project. 

Nashville Repertory Theatre opens its 2015-16 season with the Pultizer Prize-nominated contemporary play Rapture, Blister, Burn, running September 3-19, 2015 in Johnson Theater at Tennessee Performing Arts Center. 

Nashville Repertory Theatre opens its 2015-16 season with the Pultizer Prize-nominated contemporary play Rapture, Blister, Burn, running September 3-19, 2015 in Johnson Theater at Tennessee Performing Arts Center. 

'In The Next Room, or the Vibrator Play' -- Sarah Ruhl's charming and hilarious stage work -- is a smart commentary on the intersection of love and medicine. It takes place at a time when doctors utilized vibrator therapies on their female patients in the name of medical treatment.

'In The Next Room, or the Vibrator Play' -- Sarah Ruhl's charming and hilarious stage work -- is a smart commentary on the intersection of love and medicine. It takes place at a time when doctors utilized vibrator therapies on their female patients in the name of medical treatment.

"The Laramie Project," a documentary-style drama set in Wyoming that recounts the brutal murder of an openly gay college student and named by Time magazine as 'one of the 10 best plays of the year" will launch Northwestern University's 2014-15 Mainstage season Oct. 24-Nov. 2. Directed by Rives Collins, single tickets are $5 to $25.

The 34th Mainstage season of plays and musicals at the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts at Northwestern University features award-winning directors and playwrights, acclaimed alumnae and faculty, groundbreaking plays and musicals and The Waa-Mu Show. The season reflects on the evolving definitions of family and community and invites audiences to embrace the circumstances that unite and strengthen us.