Kelly Younger's THIS WORLD WE KNOW Wins Firehouse Theatre's 2013 Festival of New American Plays

Firehouse Theatre has announced the winner of the 11th Annual Festival of New American Plays, Kelly Younger's This World We Know. Based in Los Angeles, Younger is an award-winning playwright with work staged off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. The Festival took place June 6 - 9, generously sponsored by Carole Weinstein.

Directed by Shanea N. Taylor, This World We Know tells the story of the lives of an estranged brother and sister, played by Barry Bell and Lorri Lindberg, with their younger selves, played by Charley Raintree and Audra Honaker. As the play unfolds, the characters struggle to choose between unearthing the roots of their hostility or burying their last chance at reconciliation at the earth of their family tree.

This year's runner up is James Bosley's Broad Channel. Based on the island in Queens, New York,Broad Channel reveals how a struggling family is forced to relive the pain of a suppressed past when the worth and rightful owner of a cherished painting is revealed. Broad Channel was directed by Kimberly Jones Clark and starred Chandler Hubbard, Kerry McGee, Nancy McMahon, Chris O'Neill, and Stevie Rice.

"This year's Festival was truly inspired," says Jase Smith, Interim Artistic Director of Firehouse Theatre. "We were so lucky to have finalist playwrights James Bosley and Kelly Younger so intimately involved with our directors and casts. The two finalists represented over 200 entries and are both incredible plays. They are both so good that they were separated by one vote for the grand prize. I can't wait to see full productions of both plays one day. Thank you to the playwrights, directors, actors and patrons who participated in the readings and talk backs and made the Festival a huge success!"

In keeping with the Firehouse Theatre's mission of promoting new work by American artists, the Festival of New American Plays began in 2002 as a way to encourage and incubate new plays by established and emerging playwrights in the USA. It has become a grassroots event with substantial involvement from the community, as hundreds of scripts submitted to the Playwriting Contest from all over the country are read by volunteer readers from the Greater-Richmond area. Each script is read twice (more if it needs a tiebreaker), and scripts with "two thumbs up" are passed on for further evaluation to an expert panel of judges, who then pick two finalists for a four-night Festival "showdown." Members of the festival audience who have seen staged readings of both finalists' work cast a vote for their favorite play, and the winner of the festival is chosen by the public. Festival winners receive cash prizes.

Kelly Younger is an award-winning playwright with work staged off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. New York's Irish Repertory Theatre commissioned Younger to write the stage adaptation of the novel Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn, the production of which ran off-Broadway Fall 2010. Select theatre works include: Once a Marine (PlayFest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater, The Blank Theatre); I Think You Think I Love You (Playscripts; Smith and Kraus anthology "Best Plays of 2005"); Forgive me, Father (JAC publishing); Lady Gregory's Ingredients (JAC publishing), winner of the Ireland National Lady Gregory Playwriting Award; Off Compass (Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA) winner of the John Gassner New Play Award; Epiphany Cake (Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, Moving Arts); and Why Wyoming (Three Graces), Critics' Choice Samuel French off- Broadway Festival. He is currently a Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University where he leads workshops in Playwriting and teaches courses in Dramatic Literature.

James Bosley is the artistic director of Northern Manhattan's UP Theater Company and is the author of UP's inaugural play, All the Best Ingredients directed by Rik Walter. His previous works have been produced by MCC Theater, The Williamstown Theatre Fringe Festival, Qwirk Productions, Emerging Artists, The Ice Factory, Fay Simpson Dance Theatre, Bad Rep, Red Earth, PROP (Chicago) She's In The Attic (San Francisco) among others. His play Fun, developed at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, has had many productions in the U.S. and abroad, has been translated into German and Flemish and is published by Dramatic Publishing Company. The film version of Fun, for which he wrote the screenplay, was shown in competition at Sundance and other festivals, and opened commercially at the Film Forum in NYC. His screenplay was nominated for an IFP Spirit Award.