'Windowmen' awarded Outstanding New Script at last night's Norties

Ryan Landry presents the award for Outstanding New Script to Steven Barkhimer

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees at last night's Elliot Norton Awards, but especially to Steven Barkhimer, whose Windowmen was awarded Outstanding New Script! Windowmen lead Alex Pollock received the Outstanding Actor award in the Small or Fringe category for his performance...and also for his stage turns in Company One's The Flick and Gloucester Stage Company's This Is Our Youth.

Alumni news, in brief:

The Accident

The nominations for this year's Elliot Norton Awards include nods to Steven Barkhimer (Windowmen) and Peter M. Floyd (Absence) in the Best New Script category. Windowmen is also nominated in the Outstanding Production, Outstanding Ensemble, and Outstanding Design categories; Alex Pollock is also nominated for his performance in Windowmen...

Ronan Noone's short film The Accident (based on his ten-minute play I Glue You and starring Mary McCann and Andrew Rothenberg, above) was an official selection for the Boston International Film Festival earlier this month, and is also an official selection for the Montclair Film Festival next month...

Winning weekend

Current MFAs (and friends!) display their awards on the terrace of the Kennedy Center last weekend. L-R: Lesley University's Cassie M. Seinuk, NYU's Nick Carr, and our own Abbey Fenbert and Stephanie Brownell. Not pictured: Steven Barkhimer and Michael Parsons. Read more.

Congratulations, all! (And thanks for the photo, Steph!)

'Windowmen' wins IRNE for Best New Play

Congratulations to all of last night's IRNE winners and nominees, but especially to Steven Barkhimer, whose Windowmen won Best New Play in the Small/Fringe Company category! (Photo: Christopher McKenzie via Instagram)

Foxhole camaraderie and mid-night dealings

Steven Barkhimer

I’ve confessed elsewhere that I only began writing Windowmen because I needed some speakable dialogue for a playwriting class and had grown tired of some of my oh-so-original ideas for plays. So I decided to write down a few anecdotes about these guys I worked with at the Fulton Fish Market shortly after I graduated college. I was impressed not only by their dedication to the tough-guy persona, but by their awareness that it WAS a persona, one they relished and wore with gusto. They were self-consciously macho, blisteringly and relentlessly vulgar, fiercely funny, and displayed a kind of foxhole camaraderie amid the mad mid-night dealings that took place when the market was in full swing at 4 a.m. Most of all, however, I was impressed by their spontaneous and utterly immediate wit, making hilarious remarks and sometimes dangerous decisions that could never have been pre-planned. Thus, despite its being a fictional work, the best stuff in the play is stuff I could never have invented. I found myself laughing out loud as I wrote. 

Checking in on Fulton Fish

This is the Windowmen set about a week ago. (Here's an earlier update.)

Talkin' To: Steven Barkhimer

Steven Barkhimer talks about his play Windowmen -- which opens next week -- in the latest video from superstar intern Alexis Scheer.

Fulton Fish in the back theatre

Anthony Phelps' set model for Steven Barkhimer's Windowmen (which opens in previews on Halloween) and building progress over the past week or so...

Alumni news, in brief:

The world premiere of Karen Zacarías' Just Like Us (based on the book by Helen Thorpe) opens at the Denver Center Theatre Company on Oct. 4...

Central Square Theater will host a reading of Dan Hunter's latest play, Black Cat, on Oct. 1...

Monica Bauer's solo show The Year I Was Gifted opens in NYC -- part of Stage Left Studios' Women at Work Festival -- this weekend...

Steve Barkhimer hits the stage this week in Ginger Lazarus' Burning here at BPT, days before putting on his playwright hat for his own show Windowmen...

Kate Snodgrass will appear in Sleeping Weazel's The Madness of Small Worlds (in the short play Wrench by Elana Greenfield) at The Paramount Center next month...

Thinking about 2013-14

The amazing cast of Jaclyn Villano's The Company We Keep (L-R: Jessica Webb, Bill Mootos, John Kooi, and Marianna Bassham)


It is not a joke when I say that I cannot imagine a season more exciting than this one. I've had a front row seat -- literally -- for the evolution of Ginger Lazarus' Burning at Rhombus; I remember when Steve Barkhimer wrote the first scenes of Windowmen in one of Richard's classes (me being lucky enough to be his classmate and all) years ago; and I was positively blown away by the emotion and power of Peter M. Floyd's Absence at a reading last spring.

It's inspiring to be even a small part of this, and I can't wait to see these scripts come to life. Trust me: You should be excited too!

Tickets

Alumni news, in brief:

Necessary Monsters, a new play by John Kuntz, is part of this weekend’s Summer Workshop at the Huntington on July 21…

Plank by John Greiner-Ferris is on the bill of LiveWire Chicago Theatre's VisionFest 5: Johnny 5 is Alive… 

Monica Bauer will perform her solo show The Year I Was Gifted at 59E59's East to Edinburgh festival this weekend, before taking the play across the pond to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August…

Announcing our 2013-14 season!

Steven Barkhimer

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) announced its 32^nd season today, which will feature new work by three of its award-winning alumni playwrights. The line-up includes Burning by Ginger Lazarus, Windowmen by Steven Barkhimer, and Absence by Peter M. Floyd. All three writers are based in Boston.

“I’m honored and excited to support these particular playwrights. They are vastly different writers, but each of them is exploring that ‘threshold moment,’ the turning point that changes lives,” BPT Artistic Director Kate Snodgrass said. “These are the important moments we look for in the theatre.”

Alumni news, in brief:

Zayd Dohrn's Long Way Go Down opens this week (May 17) at the Art of Acting Studio in Los Angeles, in a production by its professional company, the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater...

The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarías opens at Horizon Theatre in Atlanta May 16...

New plays by Peter Floyd, Deirdre Girard, K. Alexa Mavromatis (whose play features fellow alum Steven Barkhimer), and BTM vet Patrick Gabridge -- this season's New Voices @ New Rep Playwriting Fellows -- will be read next week in New Rep's Festival of New Voices...

The Farm by Walt McGough (which was part of our 2011-12 season) will open at Stony Point, NY's Penguin Rep in September...

Read about Werner Trieschmann's recent project with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic...

Voices of BTM XV: Steven Barkhimer

Steven Barkhimer

Odd I never thought of it. The Boston Theater Marathon is turning fifteen, and I moved to the Boston area fifteen years ago. It has somehow gone underappreciated by me that I was in the very first one!  So in a sense the Marathon and I have “grown up” here together. I was present at its birth, if not its conception, and have loved it from its glorious birth through its rambunctious infancy. And even though it has outpaced me in terms of reaching a certain maturity, my feelings for it are entirely undiminished.

But oh! I remember it as a kid – it was so lively, so exuberant, so – so impossible! And yet, there it was! Organized as intricately as a multi-pronged military invasion and running with the efficiency of a Swiss train. And all taking place, quite improbably, in the space so many of us now regard as home, the Boston Playwrights' Theatre.

BTM XV: The Warm-Up Laps Saturday, May 11

Steven Barkhimer

12 p.m.
Windowmen by Steven Barkhimer
Sponsored by SpeakEasy Stage Company
Directed by Brett Marks  

In 1981, Stevie is just out of college with a degree in philosophy and finds himself working – where else? – at the fish market beneath the Brooklyn Bridge with tough streetwise salesmen. He is the junior co-worker to Joe, and they man their stations at a window where they must record sales and handle thousands of dollars in cash at lightning speed. Despite their very different backgrounds, Steve and Joe develop a friendship, but Steve soon finds himself complicit in a scheme that robs the company, a scheme that is coming under intensified scrutiny by Leo, the flinty no-nonsense boss. When push comes to shove and the situation becomes dangerous, possibly even life-threatening, Stevie is treated to some challenging lessons about friendship, loyalty, honesty, and negotiating the complexities of adult life.

BPT @ AWP: photographic evidence

 

Here are a few of the BPT superstars – Melinda Lopez, Steven Barkhimer, and Lydia Diamond – who were part of the “Playwright as Actor/Actor as Playwright” panel at AWP yesterday. The panel also included John Kuntz and Kate Snodgrass. Thanks for the photo, Johnny!

BPT @ AWP

BPT will have quite a presence at this week’s annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), here in Boston:

• Gregory Fletcher is one of the presenters this morning in "The Ten-Minute Play: The Essential Ingredients;"

• Tonight’s keynote will feature BPT founder Derek Walcott in conversation with poet Seamus Heaney;

• And on Saturday morning Steven Barkhimer, Lydia Diamond, John Kuntz, Melinda Lopez, and Kate Snodgrass will present "Playwright as Actor/Actor as Playwright" and discuss creating characters from their perspectives as trained actors. (Melinda, Bark, and Johnny wrote about this very thing for Playwrights’ Perspective last fall – check out their posts!)

Way to represent, BPT!

Alumni news, in brief:

Lots of BPT love in the 2013 IRNE nominations last weekend: Jaclyn Villano’s The Company We Keep (Best New Play, Small Theatre); Molly Trainer (Best Costume Design, Small Theatre, for Deported/a dream play); Steven Barkhimer for his work onstage (Best Supporting Actor – Musical, Small/Mid-size Theatre) and off (Best Music Director, Small/Mid-size Theatre) in Stoneham Theatre’s Lumberjacks in Love; Melinda Lopez (Best Supporting Actress – Drama, Small/Mid-size Theatre) for The Motherf**ker With the Hat at Speakeasy Stage; and Rick Park (Best Supporting Actor – Drama, Small/Mid-size Theatre) for Company One’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo…

Alumni news, in brief:

Peter Floyd’s award-winning play Absence – one of the finalists in the 2013 Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition – will be read at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta on Feb. 5, part of the annual festival celebrating the competition’s top plays…

The next play in the Munroe Saturday Nights reading series is Widow’s Walk by Deirdre Girard (directed by Melinda Lopez), at Lexington’s Munroe Center for the Arts on Feb. 2…

Steve Barkhimer will next hit the stage in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of Will Eno’s Middletown…

Karen Zacarías talks about her new adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence…

The Playwright/Actor Dynamic

Ken Baltin and Steven Barkhimer

Richard Schotter stops me in the hall of Boston Playwrights' Theatre. “So how’s Jonathan coming along?” He’s asking about Jonathan Sussman, the character I’m playing in his latest play, The Sussman Variations, here at BPT, starting November 1. My kneejerk response is to say, “Hey, you’re the playwright; you tell me!” (As in “What do I know? I’m just the actor.”)

But I don’t. I say “Good; how is he coming along for you?”, because I realize Richard is not asking me how my “character work” is coming along, or whether I’m “ready” for opening in five days, or giving me “notes” about how to portray the character. What he’s asking me – as a colleague, and this is the remarkable thing about him, and about work at Boston Playwrights' in general -- is “does what we have feel good to you, make sense to you, does it flow properly, give you time to adjust?” etc. Are we working together as best we can to tell this story? He is asking me, with the confidence of a playwright who knows what story he wants to tell, and the trust of a fellow artist, what I think.