During the Fall of 2008, we sent word out far and wide regarding the 2009 New Works Festival and invited playwrights to send us their scripts regardless of topic or style. The response was amazing, and by December, we were receiving new plays every week from as far away as Nova Scotia, Washington D.C, Los Angeles, Seattle, and all points in between.
After an exhilarating and thorough review process, we are honored to host playwrights Joseph Frost of Jackson, MS; Joan Dunayer of Champaign, IL; and John Philpit of New York City, NY, as playwrights-in-residence in Pagosa Springs, CO.
In addition to the week’s staged readings, the playwrights and their directors gathered for a conversation about the new play development process at the Ruby Sisson Public Library as a part of the Library’s Lifelong Learning Series.
The staged readings were directed by Shane Fuller, Felicia Meyer, and Charles M Pepiton.
Anathema by Joseph Frost
(Drama) In a small Irish home, an elderly working class couple, Olive and George, support their son, Shaun, and his artwork. One day, Olive brings home a young girl, Alice, for her son, but Shaun wants nothing to do with her. However, George takes an interest in the girl, and teaches her to make eggs for breakfast, which finally catches Shaun’s interest. Alice continues to invade the simple dynamics of the family’s relationships, eventually taking over Olive’s role as parent and art agent, leading to an uncovering of the family secrets and the need for redemption. Anathema is heartwarming, startling, and definitely not to be missed.
Playwright Bio:
Joseph Frost is an award-winning playwright and currently serves as Asst. Professor & Chair of the Theatre Department at Belhaven College in Jackson, MS. His plays have been presented around the country, including a short play van Gogh at an Exhibit of the Artist’s Work at the Chrysler Museum of Art, and two works The Great Play and DisEase performed at the 2003 CITA North American Conference. Joseph is a member of CITA and the Dramatists Guild of America, a participant in the annual Art Within Symposium for writers of faith, and the founding artistic director of the Floodlight Theatre Company.
Seeking Flight by Joan Dunayer
(Comedy-Drama) Seeking Flight is loosely based on actual experiments, conducted by Irene Pepperberg, with the African gray parrot Alex. The play takes place in the present, in a psychology laboratory of a U.S. university. The main characters, Monty and Enzi, are African gray parrots. Experimenter Sandra Barstow is testing the parrots’ ability to understand and speak English, name, count, and classify objects. However, Monty and Enzi already know enough English to understand what Sandra says, but she has no idea of the parrots’ own form of communication, in which the parrots comment, converse, and compose poetry. “Wanna be parrot! Wanna be free!” Seeking Flight is as hilarious and sly as it is thought provoking and moving.
Playwright Bio:
A professional writer-editor, Joan Dunayer is the author of articles and essays published in magazines, journals, and anthologies; the commentaries for new editions of nineteen literary classics; two nonfiction books; and, since 2007, five plays. Her short play Time to Go has been produced by Heartland Theatre Company (Normal, IL) and Love Creek Productions (New York). Dunayer’s full-length comedy-drama Seeking Flight has received public readings by the Baltimore Playwrights Festival (BPF) and Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre (Mars Hill, NC). Her full-length drama Apes on Display, too, has received a BPF public reading. A graduate of Princeton University, Dunayer has master’s degrees in English education, English literature, and psychology. She currently resides in Champaign, Illinois.
Contrapositive by John Philpit
(Suspense) Father Joseph is a Dean at a Roman Catholic college. Martha is a partner at a think-tank in Washington, DC. The two seriously considered marriage before he decided to attend seminary. When Martha mysteriously shows up 20 years later at his office, their mutual affection immediately resurfaces. The tone soon takes a sinister turn when Martha reveals that she has stolen the only publicly available copies of his dissertation from Harvard Library and the Library of Congress. In fact, she plans to eradicate all knowledge of the writing. A play of murder, conspiracy, faith, and betrayal. Contrapositive will surely keep you on the edge of your seat and have you talking for days.
Playwright Bio:
John Philpit has been writing plays for over 15 years in New York City. At first, it was in addition to his day job as a software designer, but more recently playwriting has become his main creative outlet. Early productions include the one act play One Rose Among Us and the full-length comedy Model Son. In 2000, his play about the difficulty of finding romance with a superhero, called Super Eros, played at the New York Fringe Festival. He has been working on a musical comedy about Helen of Troy called Choosing Helen for about 10 years, and he hopes it will be ready for a production later in 2009. His most recent work, at this time called Contrapositive, has taken many different forms, each in a different setting (including Vatican City, a Lower East Side apartment in New York, a dean’s office in a college near Boston) and many different casts of characters, but always about the same questions.