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...

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...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.