Meme fever, continued

  

I ran across this, and thought we should add it to our collection...

On the Ground Floor with...Michael S. Parsons

Michael S. Parsons

On April 29-May 3, work by this year’s MFA class – MJ Halberstadt (May 1), Michael S. Parsons (May 3), Rick Park (April 29), and Jaclyn Villano (May 2) – will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with BPT Visiting Professor Richard Schotter’s The Sussman Variations (April 30). We celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays!

All five readings are free and begin at 7 p.m. – reserve your seat and get additional information.

KAM: Tell us a little about Sumner Falls.

MSP: At its heart, Sumner Falls is about a family in crisis. Melanie Sumner is a Deputy Sheriff in a small Cape Cod town that bears the family name. Her husband has given up his dreams, her father-in-law is proud yet damaged, and an uncle, a convicted murderer, returns from prison to shake up the family tree and bring the past to light. And then the weird stuff starts happening.

On the Ground Floor with...Jaclyn Villano

Jaclyn Villano

On April 29-May 3, work by this year’s MFA class – MJ Halberstadt (May 1), Michael S. Parsons (May 3), Rick Park (April 29), and Jaclyn Villano (May 2) – will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with BPT Visiting Professor Richard Schotter’s The Sussman Variations (April 30). We celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays!

All five readings are free and begin at 7 p.m. – reserve your seat and get additional information.

 

KAM: Tell us a little about The Company We Keep.

JV: The premise of The Company We Keep is simple: upon moving to the same city, four longtime friends reunite for lunch. Of course, nothing stays simple or goes as planned. Everyone is guarding secrets, and before the main course is served, the group is rocked by betrayal and transgressions. The friendly lunch devolves into a ruthless, high-stakes struggle for power among the four friends. Things get ugly. Really ugly. I’m considering the tagline: This is not your mother’s luncheon. 

Try this at home

 

April is National Poetry Month, and the amazing folks at Brain Pickings (which I love -- check it out!) have been celebrating by posting book spine poems like this and this. So of course I had to see what some of my theatre books could do:

                                   Words at play
                                   Everything was possible:
                                   Crimes of the Heart, The Pillowman, Arcadia
                                   Inherit the Wind, U.S. Drag, Our Town
                                   Henry IV, Waiting for Godot, Jitney

                                   Divine fire, burning vision in their own words...wings!

By the way, today is Poem in Your Pocket Day! Fun!

On the Ground Floor with...MJ Halberstadt

The Mayor of BPT (Photo: Ze Laing Photography)

On April 29-May 3, work by this year’s MFA class – MJ Halberstadt (May 1), Michael S. Parsons (May 3), Rick Park (April 29), and Jaclyn Villano (May 2) – will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with BPT Visiting Professor Richard Schotter’s The Sussman Variations (April 30). We celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays!

All five readings are free and begin at 7 p.m. – reserve your seat and get additional information.


KAM: Tell us a little about And Then Came Tuesday.

MJH: I consider And Then Came Tuesday to be a comic tragedy -- it's light and funny but its structure suggests Greek tragedy. The plot centers around Peggy Babcock, who has hosted her weekly book club every Tuesday for as long as anyone in Rockville Centre can remember. She entices the book club with an array of delicious cakes, a view of her gorgeous garden, and news of a former book club member mysteriously filing for divorce within a week after the wedding. Despite Peggy's husband Bobby's warnings, the women begin an effort to dig up the truth about the 'newlyfleds,' recruiting the Peggy's spoiled daughter and the local hairstylist. The search becomes a race to uncover the truth when the book club begins suspecting that Peggy's efforts to dig up secrets are meant to protect a dirty secret or two of her own. I began writing the play last summer, and have been workshopping it on and off in both Ronan and Melinda's classes.

IRNE congrats to John Kuntz!

John Kuntz as The Stranger in The Hotel Nepenthe (Photo: Stratton McCrady)

Congratulations to John Kuntz, whose The Hotel Nepenthe won the 2012 IRNE Award for Best New Play, Small Theatre (Actors Shakespeare Project)...and to all of last night's winners and nominees!

Alumni news, in brief:

Peter M. Floyd picked up his Jean Kennedy Smith Award (for his play Absence) at last weekend's KCACTF in Washington, D.C. Read all about his experience there on his brand-new blog... 

Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly is nominated for an Outer Critics' Circle Award in the Best New Broadway Play category (along with frequent BTM contributor Theresa Rebeck's Seminar)...

Steve Barkhimer, John Kuntz, and Rick Park are part of the all-star cast that will read Dustin Lance Black's 8 (with Gavin Creel) on April 30 at A.R.T. ...

Check out Ginger Lazarus on Adam Szymkowicz's blog...

While we're on the topic of our nation's capital, John Grenier-Ferris' Turtles has been selected by The Inkwell Theatre for development this summer...

Karmo Sanders at the Sarasota Film Festival in support of her short film Face It...

Southbridge by our friend Reginald Edmund (part of last year's Ground Floor New Play Series) will be part of the 2012-13 season at Chicago Dramatists...

On the Ground Floor with...Richard Schotter

Richard Schotter

On April 29-May 3, work by this year’s MFA class – MJ Halberstadt (May 1), Michael S. Parsons (May 3), Rick Park (April 29), and Jaclyn Villano (May 2) – will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with BPT Visiting Professor Richard Schotter’s The Sussman Variations (April 30). We celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays!

All five readings are free and begin at 7 p.m. – reserve your seat and get additional information.

KAM: Tell us a little about The Sussman Variations.

RS: I imagined The Sussman Variations as a combination of a serious family play, a comedy and a play infused with music. Music is something that always seems to appear in my plays and I’m not speaking here of the musicals, but in straight plays as well. I wanted this play to be saturated with music. The main character of the play, Charlie Sussman, is an aging musical theatre composer, his daughter-in-law, Deirdre, is a concert pianist, his grand daughter, Miranda, plays the cello. So music links them but also divides them. I suppose the play is about the the way families misunderstand one another and how, sometimes, those misunderstandings can’t quite be resolved. Everyone comes together in an old house on the Connecticut coast to celebrate Charlie’s s seventy-fifth birthday, but things don’t go exactly as planned.

Happy 448th birthday, William Shakespeare!

Here's the naked truth: It kind of sets my teeth on edge to post this here without crediting someone.   But sometimes, in our brave new [online] world, finding the creators of these things that get shared around all over the place is like a wild goose chase. Truth is, deciding whether to run this uncredited truly had me in a pickle.  If this piece is yours, and your name isn't on it, for goodness sake, let me know. Please don't say, "Off with her head!" Know that it's here because I think it's the be all/end all; this is not foul play. I have a heart of gold, and love, after all, is blind.

And what's done is done.  ;)


Alumni news tomorrow [and tomorrow and...].

On the Ground Floor with...Rick Park

Rick Park

On April 29-May 3, work by this year’s MFA class – MJ Halberstadt (May 1), Michael S. Parsons (May 3), Rick Park (April 29), and Jaclyn Villano (May 2) – will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with BPT Visiting Professor Richard Schotter’s The Sussman Variations (April 30). We celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays! 

All five readings are free and begin at 7 p.m. – reserve your seat and get additional information.

KAM: Tell us a little about Gay Guy/Fat Girl.

RP: GG/FG is about two best friends in high school in the mid-80s: Josie and Stewart. Josie is the fat girl and Stewart is the gay boy. At their prom, they pinky swear with each other that if, when they are 40, they are not married, they will marry each other. Flash forward to today. Josie and Stewart meet up again after 25 years and rekindle their friendship, which gradually starts to take on a romantic bent, much to the dismay of Lux, Josie's co-worker and roommate, and Maxie, Stewart's "drag illusionist" best friend. Not to give anything away, let it suffice to say that the show includes several raunchy musical theatre numbers, an apparition of Marie Osmond and a taste of the 80s as we see what happens when friendships are threatened and frightening prospects of an uncertain and unchartered romance shake up our foursome! 

Whereas...

...the work of Joyce Van Dyke shines light into the deepest corners of the human heart, and by doing so helps to heal the deepest wounds...

Congratulations, Joyce! What a beautiful way to wrap up the week.

[Read more from The Boston Globe about this morning's Armenian Genocide commemoration ceremony at the Massachusetts State House.]

Something aMUSEing

 

Don't know about you all, but this method tends to work pretty well for me. Sometimes.

Coming soon: Q&A with each of this year's MFA playwrights, as they prepare for our annual Ground Floor Reading Series, April 29-May 3.

Alumni news, in brief:

Kate Snodgrass will receive this year's Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence at the Elliot Norton Awards ceremony on May 21, joining theatrical luminaries Julie Harris, Christopher Plummer, David Wheeler, Lynn Redgrave, Sir Ian McKellan, and the many other amazing artists who have been honored with this award. Kate will also be this year's playwright laureate at Roxbury Repertory Theatre's 6 Playwrights in Search of a Stage on April 27, where her short play Brickwork will be performed; also on the bill is MJ Halberstadt with The Milkman. (Also, rumor has it that John Grenier-Ferris will grace the stage in one of the plays...)

To honor her work on Deported/a dream play, this Friday joint House/Senate resolutions will be awarded to Joyce Van Dyke during the Armenian community's annual commemoration of the Armenian Genocide at the Massachusetts State House...

MJ Halberstadt received the MFA Creative Writing Global Fellowship in Playwriting. He will live and write in Paris this fall...

Emily Kaye Lazzaro is currently ON the stage at BPT, in Argos Productions' Murph (by Catherine M. O'Neill), which opened last weekend...

Cha Cha, Clem, and Demonio at frequent BTM playwright Kirsten Greenidge's The Luck of the Irish

But first, that *other* Marathon...and a 26.2 Brew

I'm not much of a beer drinker, and the only marathon I'll ever complete is, well, you know. So it was pretty surprising last week when I found myself completely absorbed in this conversation (see below) between WGBH's Callie Crossley and Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company. They chat about the artistry of craft beer, the passion behind the process, and the entrepreneurship that drives the company (which makes all the Samuel Adams beers). I especially liked the stories about the early days of the company, founded in 1984.

This year, the company has introduced a special limited edition 26.2 Brew to celebrate Boston's other Marathon, which incorporates coriander and salt. Bottoms up!

Look for Alumni News tomorrow.

"Vowels"

Vowels from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Here's a little something for all the people of letters out there...

Plays and Playwrights of BTM XIV

Announcing the plays and playwrights of Boston Theater Marathon XIV. Congratulations to all you beautiful people (all 53 of you -- this year, we're SUPER-sized!):

Shrapnel by Yavni Bar-Yam

Saving Walter Cronkite by Cliff Blake

3 AM by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich

The Comfort Station by Robert Brustein

The Writer and the Talker by Con Chapman

Gay Paree by Andrea Fleck Clardy

The Flying Winter Princess by Mary Conroy

Sarcasms Anonymous by Robbi D’Allessandro

Wishful Thinking by Beth Derochea

Preview of Coming Attractions by Andy Dolan

New Noises 2012 - Massachusetts Young Playwrights' Project

Check out a few of our favorite photos from last week's Massachusetts Young Playwrights' Project.

Steve Barkhimer, Robert D. Murphy and some students in Changing of the Guards by Jordan Browne of Cambridge Rindge & Latin School.

Tune in: OMPF's Global Watch Party Happening

Couldn’t get enough of Boston’s first-ever One-Minute Play Festival? We didn’t think so.

Good news: The fun’s not over. BPT will host the Festival again in 2013, and in the meantime you can get your one-minute play fix by tuning in to OMPF’s Global Watch Party Happening. Here’s more about it:

On Monday, April 16, 2012, The One-Minute Play Festival (#OMPF) and #NEWPLAY TV join together to launch an experiment we’re calling the Global Watch Party Happening.

This simultaneous, multi-city network of watch parties for viewing the Chicago One-Minute Play Festival is an experiment and a celebration of the possibilities of #NEWPLAY TV’s shared platform and the multiple communities that support the development of local artists and culture through the One-Minute Play Festival.

On Monday April 16th, 2012 at 5:30pm PDT / 7:30pm CDT / 8:30pm EDT, the 2nd Annual Chicago One-Minute Play Festival at Victory Gardens will stream on #NEWPLAY TV at newplaytv.info.

Eighty-five brand new one-minute plays by fifty local Chicago playwrights will be presented by a company of around sixty-five actors, staged by ten directors. Come check out what it being said in the Chicago artistic community at this moment in time by experiencing the work of OMPF, and engaging in a conversation about it.

Alumni news, in brief:

Plenty of alums are on the bill for Boston Theater Marathon XIV. The line-up will include Peter M. Floyd, Deirdre Girard, Heather Houston, Melinda Lopez, Walt McGough, Ronan Noone, Rick Park, Michael S. Parsons, and Donna Sorbello. Keep an eye on this space for much, much more about all things BTM in the coming weeks...

Boston's Fresh Ink Theatre Co. announced its very exciting 2012-13 season last week, which will feature Ginger Lazarus' The Embryos, Emily Kaye Lazzaro's Girl Sports, and [BTM regular] Patrick Gabridge's Fire on Earth...

And speaking of Patrick Gabridge, check out the latest of his blog's excellent "Juggler Interviews" -- a Q&A series which focuses on writers busy parenting while still making time for their art -- featuring BPT alum John Shea...

Wes Savick's Yesterday Happened: Remembering H.M., a science theater collaboration between Underground Railway Theater & MIT, opens this Thursday at Central Square Theater. H.M. features Wes' BPT classmate Steve Barkhimer...

Les Hunter's adaptation of Turkish playwright Ozen Yula's For Rent opens April 11 at NYC's LaGuardia Performing Arts Center...

Walt McGough shared some thoughts about writing non-human characters with fledgling dramatists last week, as part of the Massachusetts Young Playwrights' Project's New Noises Festival. Get a taste of his talk here...

Yeah, these things are still cracking me up...

...and here's where to go if you need more. (And if you really 
need an O'Neill fix, there's always this.) Happy Friday!

'Forsythia'

How could I resist posting this? It's everywhere! [When I was an undergrad, my fellow actors and I had to act out this poem in our oral interpretation class. We were the best forsythia ever!] 

Read more about Mary Ellen Solt and concrete poetry.

What’s required

Sunday’s April Fool’s “opportunity” has made me think this week about the more serious side of the submissions game. The requirements in Mark Harvey Levine’s hilarious piece are, of course, deliciously over-the-top…but we’ve all seen that crazy call with a million hoops to jump through, that really does seem to require everything short of cramming a woodland creature in an envelope. What requests are unreasonable?

I've also been thinking about the fact that my submission habits – and views of what is acceptable for theatres to require – have shifted a bit over time. For example, paying fees was once my line in the sand and I never used to pay them. Ever. For any reason, to anyone. Now I will from time to time (though over the course of a year I can count those submissions on one hand), if the theatre gives prizes to writers or someone I know personally recommends the theatre.

But enough about me.

Alumni news, in brief:

Cha Cha and Demonio serenade their friend Clem after Next To Normal. They are not normal, either.

Karen Zacarías' The Book Club Play will be part of the 2012-13 seasons at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park and at Rochester's Geva Theatre Center...

Monica Bauer is preparing for the Edinburgh Fringe (where her Made For Each Other will be part of the line-up) with the fundraiser Monica's Shorts at Urban Stages tonight. Can't make it? Good news: You can also contribute to the project online. And check out a very nice review of Monica's other current project, the off-Broadway production of My Occasion of Sin...

The Tolo de Abril Theatre Company announces an open call for submissions

Please read the submission requirements carefully:

1) Plays must be submitted on April 31, 2012. No plays will be accepted before or after that date.

2) Plays must be unproduced, unpublished, unperformed, and actually unwritten. Any play that has even been thought about is ineligible for this festival.

3) Plays must be exactly 121.237 minutes long in performance. For the purposes of this festival, one page is equal to 1.7143 minutes.

4) No email submissions will be accepted. No regular mail submissions will be accepted. Please print 27 copies of your play on vellum and deliver by horseback to the theater.