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3rd Will Be Doctoral Candidate at WMU:

Third year MFA G. William Zorn was accepted as a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University, beginning in the fall of 2009. He will be studying Creative Writing with an emphasis in Playwriting.

MFA Plays to be Published in Lit Mag

“Touch The Pillow” by Kara Dunn, 3rd year MFA, and “Mammals” by 2nd year MFA Ryan Dowler will be published in the Third Coast Magazine in the fall of 2009. “Third Coast is one of the nation’s premier literary magazines—and one of only a handful of nationally distributed literary magazines by graduate students. Third Coast consistently publishes excellent, and often award-winning, fiction, poetry, non-fiction and drama.”http://www.thirdcoastmagazine.com/.

First Year MFA in Residence

First year MFA playwright Jason Hall was selected to be Playwright-in-Residence for the third annual 24 Hour Play Festival at Marietta College. Jason mentored six collegiate writers who crafted one-act plays inspired by articles found in the syndicated column “News of the Weird”; the plays were given workshop productions and performed the following evening.

OU MFAs Winners at KC/ACTF

Third year MFA playwright Dana Formby has been selected as co-winner of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region 3 ten minute play festival. Her play Armed with Peanut Butter will now be one of sixteen considered for inclusion at the national festival in Washington DC, in contention for the national ten minute play award. Cecilia Copeland’s and Reina Hardy’s one act plays were selected as first runner up and honorable mention in the one act play competition.

MFA Alum Update: Jacqmin

2007 alum Laura Jacqmin’s play AND WHEN WE AWOKE THERE WAS LIGHT AND LIGHT has been selected as a winner of Aurora Theatre Company’s 2009 Global Age Project, along with plays by Joel Drake Johnson, Wendy MacLeod, and Dan Hoyle; a reading is scheduled for February 23. Additionally, her play SPACE wil be published in 24 by 24: The 24 Hour Plays Anthology(Playscripts, Inc.) along with plays by Adam Bock, John Clancy, Mike Doughty, Will Eno, David Ives, Warren Leight, David Lindsay-Abaire, Terrence McNally, Elizabeth Meriwether, Mac Rogers, Lucy Thurber, and Stephen Winter. Her play 10 VIRGINS will be published by Playscripts, Inc. later this year, and both MENUS and PARKERSBURG are slated to be published by Smith & Kraus in the coming year.

Three OU MFA Playwrights at KC/ACTF in Saginaw:

MFA playwrights Dana Formby, Cecilia Copeland, and Reina Hardy are each at the Region 3 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in Saginaw, Michigan this week. Cecilia and Reina each had one act plays selected as two of the top six submitted in the region (comprised of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin), and Dana’s ten minute play “Armed With Peanut Butter” is one of the top six selected for the 10-minute festival there. In the last four years, Ohio Univsersity has had more new plays invited to the regional festival than any other, and more top finishes, including two OU scripts (by Jacqmin & Zorn) tied for first place in the 10-minute competition last year. Additionally, Nick Knittel, a student in Dana Formby’s beginning playwriting class, was also invited to have the one act he wrote under her tutelage read at the festival, making it so that 50% of the one acts at the festival this year come from OU writers.

MFA Alum’s Play at Actor’s Theater of Louisville

2B (Or Not 2B), by 2003 MFA playwriting alum Jacquelyn Reingold, will be featured as part of a bill of one acts at Actor’s Theater of Louisville later this month. From the ATL web site: “[Matchgames is] an evening of short plays about one of the most enduring obsessions: affairs of the heart. Whether love is found, lost, botched or misunderstood, this seductive and funny collection of plays explores the tempestuous territory of attraction. The MATCH GAMES playlist is: Controlling Interest by Wayne S. Rawley, Sure Thing by David Ives, So Tell Me About This Guy by D.W. Gregory, Surprise by Mark Harvey Levine, The Processional by Robert D. Kemnitz and Jennifer McMaster, Mr. and Mrs. by Julie Marie Myatt, 2B (Or Not 2B) by Jacquelyn Reingold, The Blue Room by Courtney Baron, Eros Is Sore Spelled Backwards by Martin Russell, and Après Opéra by Michael Bigelow Dixon and Valerie Smith.” Reingold is currently on the writing staff of HBO’s In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne. For more information on the production, see the ATL web site at:http://www.actorstheatre.org/play_match.htm.

Formby Working with Local 75

Local 75, a playwriting workshop based in Chicago, has selected 3rd year MFA Dana Lynn Formby to participate in a year-long project developing her new play “Inherit the Whole”. From their web site: “Local 75 is about developing working class writers. It is about developing working class stories for the theater. It is about developing a working class audience. Inspired by union’s support of workers, LOCAL 75 is a playwriting workshop for artistic tradesmen and tradeswomen to develop their craft.” See Dana’s interview and more about Local 75:http://local75.wordpress.com/dana-lynn-formbys-deal/

Jacqmin Named P73 Finalist

Recent alum Laura Jacqmin, winner of the 2008 Wasserstein Award, has been named a finalist for the P73 playwriting program in New York. (See post from 10/22 below for more info on P73.)

Schneider to Present at MATC

2nd year MFA playwright Garret Scneider has been invited to present his paper exploring “Midnight Madness”, the weekly OU MFA playwriting production, at the Mid American Theater Conference this coming March in Chicago.