2000 Ohio University Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights’ Festival
Guest Mentors
Jeanette Buck is a screenwriter, director, and producing for film with an MFA from Ohio University’s School of Film. She produced and directed the feature film Out of Season which has screened in numerous film festivals and theaters across the country and internationally. Out of Season garnered festival awards for Outstanding Emerging Talent, Best Director, Best Actors, Best Editing, and Audience Favorite. Other honors include the Trisolini Fellowship, the Frameline Finishing Grant, The Reel Affirmations Finishing Grant, and the John Houk Grant. She wrote and directed the films Dead Mothers Club, Karate, Farewell, The Guide, and the documentary, In the Menstrual Hut. Buck has also served as a guest speaker on film making at film festivals nationwide and abroad. She has taught playwriting, screenwriting, and theater history at Ohio University’s School of Theater and instructed courses in film directing and film techniques at Ohio University’s School of Film.
Ed Bullins received his BA in playwriting from Antioch University and his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Publications include: How Do You Do: A Nonsense Drama, Five Plays by Ed Bullin, The Duplex: A Black Love Fable in Four Movements, The Hungered One: Early Writings, Four Dynamite Plays, The Theme is Blackness, The Reluctant Rapist. Awards include: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, Obie Awards, The AUDELCO Outstanding Pioneer Award, the National Black Theatre Festival Living Legend Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing Long-Term Significant Contributions to the Black Literary Arts Award, and Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship and Awards. Ed Bullins is the director of the Playwriting Screenwriting Workshop at Woodie King’s New Federal Theatre in Manhattan and is professor of theatre at Northeastern University in Boston.
Sherry Kramer Her plays have been produced extensively here and abroad and include David’s RedHaired Death, The Mad Master, Things That Break, What a Man Weighs, The Wall of Water, Ivanhoe, MO., The Law Makes Evening Fall, and a new one woman, one Barbie play, SOFA: Enchanted Evening. She is the recipient of NEA, NYFA, and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Award, a New York Drama League Award, the L.A. Woman in Theater New Play Award, the Jane Chambers Award, and was the first national member of New Dramatists. She teaches playwriting at the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin, and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, where she was head of the workshop in 1996. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing.
Milan Stitt was born in Detroit and attended Cooley High School and the University of Michigan. Long associated with the Circle Repertory Company in New York City, which produced all of his plays including Back in the Race and The Runner Stumble with William Hurt. He wrote and directed “Labor Day” for company member Christopher Reeve. The Runner Stumbles was named Best Broadway Play of 1976 in the annual Best Plays book. It has been published in four American versions and translated into several languages. The film version with his screenplay was made by Stanley Kramer. Among his teleplays are The Gentleman Bandit, Kentucky Ride, and Long Shadows, which was nominated for an International Emmy for best film. As an educator, he was chairman of the Playwriting Program at the Yale School of Drama and also taught writing at Princeton, New York University, University of Michigan, and was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Worchester State University. He founded The New American Theater School at the Women’s Project and Productions. He was also the Head of the Dramatic Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University where he was awarded the Raymond W. Smith Chair in Dramatic Writing. His articles on theater and travel have appeared in The New York Times and Horizon magazine. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he received writing grants from both the New York and Michigan Councils for the Arts and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Stitt passed away in March of 2009 at the age of 68.
2000 Festival Line Up:
MFA Featured Production
Sophie
by Anne Cofell
Directed by Jennifer Vellenga
Saturday, May 27 8:00PM
Synopsis: When Marvin Gaye gave us a prescription for sexual healing, he never dreamed that quirky Sophie would go so far.
Readings:
May 25th
3:00PM The Lights Went Out on Lake Shore Drive by Jennifer Ricciardi
8:15PM Tagged by Chantal Bilodeau
May 26th
3:00PM In the Fishbowl by Brian Lindecker
8:00PM Fore by Stephen Svoboda
May 27th
1:00PM Trial by Water: A Gook Story Part One