Hughes and Lazzaro selected for Playwrights' Commons retreat

Hughes

Alums Colleen Hughes and Emily K. Lazzaro have been selected to participate in Playwrights’ Commons’ Freedom Art Theatre Retreat in August! This dynamic duo will be joined by a number of area theatre artists (including other BU alums), in a program led by Associate Professor and Playwrights' Commons Founder Ilana Brownstein. See the full list of participants here. 

Congrats guys – this is terrific!

Lazzaro

About the Retreat

Emerging Boston-area playwrights, designers, and dramaturgs, matched into creative teams together, and taken to a bucolic, peaceful, woodsy New England retreat for a week.  While there, the creative teams would be tasked with brainstorming and writing/designing/devising theatrical projects that would have been impossible to conceive of as individual artists. 

About Playwrights’ Commons

Playwrights’ Commons is a nascent playwright development (not play development) organization whose mission is to strengthen the Boston-area theatre ecology through innovative laboratories, workshops, collaborative opportunities, and fiscal sponsorships of local artists. 

Playwrights’ Commons seeks to provide dramaturgical support to writers at all stages of their careers, with a special focus on deepening the opportunities for artists who hope to put down professional roots in Boston and surrounding cities.

Award-winning play by Obolensky to be featured in Samuel French's OOB fest

Alum Masha Obolensky’s ten-minute 'Girls Play,' sponsored by the Huntington Theatre Company, has been selected to participate in Samuel French’s Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival.

Chosen from more than 1,000 submissions from producing companies, playwriting workshops, and university theatre programs, 40 plays will be presented at the 36th annual festival at The Lion Theatre on Theatre Row July 19-24. The week-long event features a full program of plays performed each night.

'Girls Play' was the winner of the 2010 KCACTF National Ten-Minute Play Award, and was also featured in Boston Theater Marathon 12 and at The Source Festival in D.C.

Congratulations, Masha!

Playwrights' Commons: A New Development Organization Launches in Boston

Another exciting opportunity for playwrights in Boston! Ilana Brownstein, professor of theatre at BU, former dramaturg at the Huntington Theatre, and, in general, a champion for playwrights and new plays, has launched a new development organization to service New England playwrights. It's called Playwrights' Commons. Another development opportunity? It's more than that. Personally, as a playwright, I think one of the cool things about it is that it's focused on the development of the playwright (the person) in new creative ways, not a development opportunity that seeks to "fix" our "broken" plays.

Here's the mission statement: "Playwrights’ Commons is a nascent playwright development (not play development) organization whose mission is to strengthen the Boston-area theatre ecology through innovative laboratories, workshops, collaborative opportunities, and fiscal sponsorships of emerging artists. Playwrights’ Commons seeks to provide dramaturgical support to writers at all stages of their careers, with a special focus on deepening the opportunities for artists who hope to put down professional roots in Boston and surrounding cities." Check out the website for more details AND, for information on how to apply for the Freedom Art Theatre Retreat this summer. Follow Playwrights Commons on Twitter @PwritesCom and on Facebook.

Play by Hughes named KCACTF national semi-finalist

BPT alum Colleen Hughes’ ten-minute play The Mouse has been named a national semi-finalist for the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). 

Playwright Colleen Hughes

If selected as a national finalist, The Mouse will be one of four ten-minute plays presented at the national festival in April. National finalist plays are cast with professional actors from the Washington, D.C., area, and compete for a $1,000 cash prize.

Plays by Deirdre Girard (Delivery) and John Zakrosky, Jr. (Ten Hours of Sleep) were also presented in the ten-minute category at the regional festival last month in Fitchburg; Deirdre’s play The End of the Argument also competed there in the one-act category.

There are numerous KCACTF awards categories for all types of student theatre artists. For the uninitiated, here’s how the ten-minute competition works:

Playwrights submit their work each fall. Plays from each KCACTF region (ours, Region I, covers New England and Eastern New York) are read by at least two readers from a different region. The top six choices are invited to Region I’s festival in January. At the festival, each playwright works with an assigned director to rehearse a public reading of his/her play. Two festival respondents respond to each play. 

From those six plays, two are chosen as national semi-finalists; those plays are then held in consideration for the national festival in Washington D.C, as national finalists. 

Masha, Masha, Masha!

BPT alum Masha Obolensky has been selected by the Huntington Theatre Company as a member of its 2010 class of Playwriting Fellows.

This honor caps off an exciting year for Masha: Her 10-minute ‘Girls Play’ won the 2010 KCACTF National Ten-Minute Play Award, and was performed in the Boston Theater Marathon and at The Source Festival in D.C. The full-length version of the script, The Girl Problem, was awarded a 2010 WordBRIDGE fellowship. Earlier this year, Masha received the 2010 PEN New England Discovery Award, and her play Not Enough Air was produced by the Nora Theatre in Cambridge.

Masha joins the long list of BPT alums selected to participate in this prestigious program: Lydia Diamond, John Kuntz, Melinda Lopez, Ronan Noone, John Shea, Kate Snodgrass, Sinan Unel, and Joyce Van Dyke.

Through the Huntington Playwriting Fellows program, the Huntington fosters relationships with talented local playwrights at all stages of their careers, from emerging talents to established professionals, and encourages and facilitates conversations among Boston's playwriting community. Fellows are awarded two-year residencies during which they are provided a modest honorarium, participate in a bi-weekly writers' collective, and benefit from access to the artistic staff and to the resources of the Huntington. The 2010 class of Huntington Fellows was selected from among 65 applicants; the group also includes playwrights Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, Miranda Craigwell, and Lawrence Goodman.

Congratulations, Masha – we’ll be watching to see what amazing things await you in 2011!

Illegitimi non carborundum

The dust-up regarding this year’s Wasserstein Prize is over – at least for now – but I wanted to share these links, to create a record of the situation for us here. I admit I was a bit behind on this controversy myself.  All of these blog posts are well worth reading:

Recap from The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog

Reaction from Boston-based playwright Kirsten Greenidge and a follow-up

NYC playwright Callie Kimball on the NPR blog

It seems appropriate, during this week when we pause to reflect on our various gifts over turkey and stuffing, to say that among the many things for which I am grateful as a playwright are colleagues such as Kirsten and Callie – and so many more – who do not shy away from taking a stand in the face of unfairness (and, in this case, absurdity). Those a bit more removed from the front lines (like me) because of other jobs, family obligations, etc., are certainly thankful for it.

[As for my own opinion, I have a one-word response to the notion that not a single play written by a woman under the age of 32 this year was deserving of such an award; however, in the interest of maintaining the family tone here, I won’t actually type the word. Instead, I will just say this: Two syllables, rhymes with “nitwit,” and begins with the letter ‘B’.]

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone.