Join us this Sunday to get in on The Ground Floor with BPT's current MFAs

Spring has sprung, and that means it's time to see what the current class of MFA playwrights has in the works. This Sunday, April 28, at 6 p.m., The Ground Floor New Play Series will feature 30-minute excerpts of five new plays-in-progress. The reading is free and open to the public, and will be right here at BPT. 

Details about the line-up of plays are below. Join us!


Tough Love by Danyele Brickner
Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw
Featuring Evelyn Howe
Lights up. Young woman enters dragging dead body. It's not what you think. Or is it? Danyele Brickner brings humor and grit to this unusual coming of age story.

Elephants by Will Carter
Directed by Jeremy Johnson
Featuring Bill Mootos
Paul Manley loves the wrong person. Every time. Will Carter investigates the troubling nature of obsession and devotion: In a world created by a loving and forgiving God, who is to blame when things go terribly wrong?

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. 

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.

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.

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! 

Southern Fried Mysticism: Q&A With Reginald Edmund

On May 1-4, work by this year’s MFA class – Peter Floyd, John Greiner-Ferris, and Heather Houston -- will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with Reginald Edmund’s Southbridge. Southbridge was the winner of the 2011 Southern Playwrights’ Competition, and is part of the Sister City Playwrights Exchange.

All four readings are free – reserve your seat and get additional information here.

Playwright Reginald Edmund

Tell us a little about Southbridge.

Southbridge was my grad school thesis project two years ago, that was the winner of the 2011 Southern Playwrights Competition, and national runner-up for both the Lorraine Hansberry and the Rosa Parks Playwriting Award. For me, this script is one of the most personal plays that I've ever written. I wrote this piece wanting to examine what it meant for people to really see each other for who they are. I wanted to explore what it means to love, really love, and to love so fully to the point that it can tear your soul out. What it means to love and how it can both heal spirits and destroy them as well. So I hope when audiences come to take part in this journey, it touches them in some kind of way.

Southbridge is part of your nine play The City of the Bayou series – that’s a pretty big undertaking. Was the project conceived as including nine plays, or…?

Like all crazy ideas, The City of the Bayou Collection started off with a singular idea: Tell the story of a singular contemporary neighborhood in Houston, Texas, and experiment with how one moment from a play can directly affect how the next play begins, and how each action one person makes can directly affect and impact the lives of others around them – creating, in essence, a social domino effect, that is constantly rippling. Later I realized that in order to have a full understanding of what America is in the present, and ultimately shall come into being in the future, that we need to closely examine the past. So Southbridge, a play set in 1881 Athens, Ohio became the second play in this series.

For so many playwrights, locale is a character in itself, and it sounds like this may be the case with The City of the Bayou series. Tell us a little bit about this environment.

I write a lot about Houston, but specifically the south, and southern culture. But to examine what modern southern culture is you have to look at how the past impacted that present. My plays and my life is so deeply entrenched in that environment that it, in truth, seems like the only place I've ever truly known. It flows through my blood. But there is something otherworldly about this city feels whenever you walk down the streets at night. There is an oddness to it, where both the past and the present seem to merge in on itself, where there is so much culture and ghosts that weigh on this town. That seems to directly impact my writing. Every play I write, I think the past seems to collide uncomfortably with the present.

On the Ground Floor with...Peter Floyd

Playwright Peter Floyd

On May 1-4, work by this year’s MFA class – Peter Floyd, John Greiner-Ferris, and Heather Houston -- will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with Reginald Edmund’s Southbridge. Southbridge was the winner of the 2011 Southern Playwrights’ Competition, and is part of the Sister City Playwrights Exchange.

 

But first, we celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays.

All four readings are free – reserve your seat and get additional information here.

Tell us a little about your thesis play.

Absence revolves around the character of Helen Bastion, an iron-willed, indomitable woman who finds herself suffering from memory loss. As she struggles to retain control over her own mind, she finds herself having to answer the question of selfhood: Is she still the same person she's always been if she can no longer remember her past?

What makes you passionate about this idea?

I have a personal stake in this play. My mother is suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Writing this has been something of an attempt for me to explore what the world must be like for someone whose very sense of reality is in flux, a way to understand what my mother is experiencing. (I hasten to add that while they are suffering from the same affliction, the character of Helen is not in any way based on my mother; their personalities are markedly different.)

On the Ground Floor With...John Greiner-Ferris

Playwright John Greiner-Ferris

On May 1-4, work by this year’s MFA class – Peter Floyd, John Greiner-Ferris, and Heather Houston -- will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with Reginald Edmund’s Southbridge. Southbridge was the winner of the 2011 Southern Playwrights’ Competition, and is part of the Sister City Playwrights Exchange.

 

But first, we celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays.

All four readings are free – reserve your seat and get additional information here.

Tell us a little about your thesis play.

Highland Center, Indiana is a story about a man who is searching for his identity and his real father. That sounds awfully boring when I write that. Maybe it will sound more interesting when I say that it contains all my favorite things to write about: guns, whiskey, incest, betrayal, death, rape, dysfunctional families, and mole traps. Highland Center, Indiana is a very real place. You can look it up on Google Maps. (Shakespeare never could have said that even about Denmark.) My mother was born and raised there, I spent many days there. My mother’s name was Alice Anne and my father’s was JP. I had an Uncle Henry. To know exactly which are the autobiographical elements and which are pure fantasy, you’ll have to come to the reading. Even then you might not be able to figure it out.

What makes you passionate about this idea?

It is said that all writers have a bone they pick, and I think identity is my bone. Identity is a very real American issue. It’s a classic American story to hear that someone would leave their current home and life and start a new life, fabricating an entirely new life and persona somewhere else, completely divorced from their past life. Think Gatsby. But then there are those who do the opposite. They reach into and search their past to learn their true selves. The first way is smoke and mirrors, like advertising, the business Billy works in. The other way is more arduous, and it’s the way Hank chooses.

On the Ground Floor With...Reginald Edmund

On May 1-4, work by this year’s MFA class – Peter Floyd, John Greiner-Ferris, and Heather Houston -- will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with Reginald Edmund’s Southbridge.

All four readings are free – reserve your seat and get additional information here.

Southbridge was the winner of the 2011 Southern Playwrights’ Competition, and comes to BPT as part of the Sister City Playwrights Exchange. The mission of Sister City is to swap talented, under-recognized playwrights in several regions of the USA and in Canada and England. In the past six years, fourteen swaps involving significant Play Labs in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Minneapolis, New York, and San Francisco helped emerging playwrights find connections, develop material and discover how their unique voices resonate in a new region.

Playwright Reginald Edmund

Southbridge is the second part of playwright Reginald Edmund’s The City of The Bayou series: A white widow is assaulted, and an angry mob is at the jail house door, screaming. "Lynch him!" The only way to untangle the truth about the events is for the accused, Christopher C. Davis, to look into the events that have lead him to a tree stump in Athens, Ohio in the year 1881.

About the playwright:

Reginald Edmund is a 2009-2010, 2010-2011 Many Voices Fellow playwright originally from Houston, Texas, where he was Artistic Director for the Silver House Theatre, as well as the founder and producer for the Silver House Playwrights Festival and the Houston Urban Theatre Series. Reggie was the inaugural recipient of the Kennedy Center Fellowship at Soul Mountain Retreat, as well as the 2009 National Runner-up for the Lorraine Hansberry and Rosa Parks Playwriting Awards.

The nine play series he is working on is titled The City of The Bayou Collection, and includes Redemption of Allah Black, Juneteenth Street, Southbridge, Last Cadillac, The Ordained Smile of Saint Sadie May Jenkins, Blood Moon, and White America. The plays have been developed at Karamu House Theatre, County Playhouse Theatre, Ensemble Theatre of Houston, the Playwrights' Center, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre Company and the Mid-American Theater Conference. He received his BFA in Theatre-Performance from Texas Southern University, and his MFA in playwriting at Ohio University under the guidance of Charles Smith.

On the Ground Floor With...Heather Houston

Playwright Heather Houston

On May 1-4, work by this year’s MFA class – Peter Floyd, John Greiner-Ferris, and Heather Houston -- will be featured in our annual Ground Floor New Play Series, along with Reginald Edmund’s Southbridge. Southbridge was the winner of the 2011 Southern Playwrights’ Competition, and is part of the Sister City Playwrights Exchange.

But first, we celebrate these exciting writers on the blog by offering an inside look at them and their plays.

All four readings are free – reserve your seat and get additional information here.

Tell us a little about your thesis play.

My play, Supergravity and the Eleventh Dimension was sparked by two separate ideas that sort of crashed into each other, scattering shrapnel everywhere, shrapnel which I then tried to direct at my characters.  One idea was that of isolation, seclusion for four characters at a cabin.  The other idea was that of M theory in physics (which isn't really my idea at all, of course).  I started thinking about loss, and how each person deals with it differently, which seemed to play right into physics and relativity... and at that point I started confusing myself, and so I thought I should write a play about it.  What resulted were Dan, Fred, Leslie, and Tom (a theoretical physicist), four friends who deal with the loss of their friend, Carmen, by visiting her cabin, which then becomes a space where time and memory are twisted.

What makes you passionate about this idea?

I'm struck again and again by the human impulse to fight for explanations for loss, and how each explanation is so different, so personal.  Also, of course, I'm excited by any opportunity to totally geek out over concepts which completely blow my mind, like black holes and superstring theory.