Opps not-to-be-missed

I’m sure you’ve seen these many other places by now, but I wanted to direct your attention once again to a couple of terrific local opportunities with deadlines rapidly approaching.

Dan Blask from the Massachusetts Cultural Council wants to make sure we remember to apply for MCC’s 2013 Artist Fellowship in Dramatic Writing. BPT alums Steve Barkhimer, Melinda Lopez, and Masha Obolensky are all past recipients of grants from MCC, so apply, people! Here are the details:

The Massachusetts Cultural Council is now accepting 2013 Artist Fellowships applications in Dramatic Writing. The deadline to apply is October 1, 2012. The program awards unrestricted grants of $7500 through a competitive, anonymously-judged process.

Bauer headed to Sewanee

Bauer

Alum Monica Bauer has been selected for this summer’s Sewanee Writers' Conference.

The conference is hosted by the University of the South, and supported by the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund established through the estate of the late Tennessee Williams. Each year, a group of accomplished writers, critics, agents, and other visitors take part.

Read more about this prestigious conference here.

Congrats, Monica!

Guest blog: The Meandering Journey of ‘My Occasion of Sin,’ by Monica Bauer

Playwright Monica Bauer

Monica Bauer is a BPT alum from the class of 2006. Her play My Occasion of Sin is currently in its world-premiere run at The Shelterbelt Theatre (tickets available on the Web site) in Omaha, NE, where it has received glowing reviews, such as this one. The story of how this production came together is a terrific reminder for all of us that the pathway from the page to the stage can often be a winding one, and I'm so glad she was willing to share it here. 

Congratulations, Monica!

Every once in a while, I try to make a plan for the development of a play. “My Occasion of Sin”, a play about the 1969 race riots in my home town of Omaha, Nebraska, was supposed to launch me into the world as a successful playwright, five years ago.

My original plan was to finish it during my year at BPT, where it would be my Thesis Play, and go on to sweep the Kennedy Center Awards. Instead, I was stuck trying desperately to find the tone between tragedy and comedy, and ended up sticking the play in a drawer for several years.

It might have stayed there forever, if I hadn’t read in American Theater Magazine that Johnny Carson had left several million dollars to his alma mater, the theater department at the University of Nebraska. I cold-called the head of the department, who put me in touch with the Artistic Director for Nebraska Repertory Theater, a summer professional theater allied with the University (and the only Equity company in the state). The Artistic Director wrote a grant, and gave me money to fly out to Lincoln, Nebraska twice over a 4 month period to workshop the play, re-write, then have a staged reading for the Nebraska Rep subscribers. The reading was scheduled for the summer of 2007.