Tom Cavanaugh's ADAM & YOSHI Set for New American Playwrights Project at Utah Shakespeare Festival, 8/22-30

The New American Playwrights Project at the Tony Award-winning, Utah Shakespeare Festival has selected L.A. playwright Tom Cavanaugh for the second time to participate in the company's premiere development theater workshop. He will develop his new play ADAM & YOSHI. Cavanaugh is the first out-of-state playwright to attend the program for a second time. In 2010, the Project developed his play BEHOLD, which explores what happens to a family when it loses a child in a school shooting caused by bullying. BEHOLD is now being considered for an Off-Broadway production in New York City and a TV movie with major cable networks in Los Angeles.

ADAM & YOSHI is a full-length stage play about a young law graduate who falls in love with a woman who believes she is a Japanese Anime Super Hero from another planet. It was inspired by visual artists on Deviantart.com who participate in "COSPLAY". Cosplay, short for "costume play," is an activity in which participants wear costumes and accessories to represent specific characters or ideas from a work of fiction. Cosplayers create a subculture centered on role playing in everyday life.

"Cosplayers dedicate themselves to the perfection of their art in front of the camera and beyond. They create and recreate pop culture personas and other characters to perfection through costumes, make-up and even set construction, but show real guts when they walk out into the world dressed in character," explains Cavanaugh. "However, Yoshi in the play takes it to whole new level and starts to live it... all the time."

ADAM & YOSHI won the 2012 Make the House Roar Prize for Comedy from the LionheArt Theatre in Georgia. ADAM & YOSHI was then chosen for its first staged reading by Play Club West in North Hollywood, CA and went on to become a finalist in the 2013 McKinney Repertory Theatre Festival in Texas.

ADAM & YOSHI explores the ideas of the self and alternate self while asking many questions: How do dreams and practical needs intersect in everyday life? How does one become brave enough to develop a vision and then live it out? And can love be the bridge which helps people live out their dreams? The play also illustrates the power of love and how Adam's love for Yoshi gives him the courage to pursue his own vision for his life.

In 2009, Cavanaugh's one act play WONDER won the Irene Bashore Award for Playwriting from Firstage Los Angeles, and he received his first commission from Twilight Productions in Gilbertsville, Kentucky for writing the one act play ACE OF HEARTS.

Cavanaugh is an accomplished screenwriter as well, and has won many screenwriting competitions since 2002. His coming-of-age story THE WILDERNESS TREATMENT won an Honorable Mention at the 2012 L.A. Movie Awards and was a finalist at the 2013 Beverly Hills Film Festival. In 2006 he was featured as a "Writer to Watch" in the March/April issue of "Script" magazine, and his screenplay THE SHIFT received financing and was professionally produced as a 22-minute short film. THE SHIFT won Best Short at the 2007 Garden State Film Festival, was a finalist at the San Fernando Valley Film Festival, and was shown as part of the Exposition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Cavanaugh is a graduate of The Actors Studio Drama School in New York where he received his M.F.A. in Playwriting and studied under Romulus Linney, Jeffrey Sweet, Jim Ryan and Laura Maria Censabella. Cavanaugh has been a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. since 1998, and he is currently a member of the Actors Gym Workshop in Hollywood, California.

ADAM & YOSHI
By Tom Cavanaugh
Directed by Aaron Galligan-Stierle
August 22, 23, 30, 2013 at 10 a.m.
In the Auditorium Theatre

Utah Shakespeare Festival
351 West Center Street at Cedar City, UT 84720
800-PLAYTIX or 435-586-7878
www.bard.org

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