2002 Ohio University Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights’ Festival
Guest Mentors
Quincy Long Productions: People Be Heard, Playwrights Horizons; The Lively Lad, New York Stage and Film and The Actors Theatre of Louisville; The Virgin Molly, Atlantic Theatre and Berkeley Rep; The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite, Atlantic Theatre and Mark Taper Forum. Joy was published by Dramatists Play Service as were People Be Heard and The Lively Lad. Current projects: Loulou, a musical, in development at the Banff Centre, commissioned by Ginger Cat Productions in Toronto; Buried Alive, a one act opera adapted from Edgar Allan Poe short story, commissioned by American Lyric Theatre; The Huntsmen, a play with songs which won a 2009 Time Warner Storyteller’s award; The Gospel According to Trains, a recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist’s grant through America-In-Play. Quincy Long grew up in Warren, Ohio, is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and lives in New York City.
(Bio from Ensemble Studio Theatre. http://ensemblestudiotheatre.org/quincy-long)
Chuck Smith is Goodman Theatre’s Resident Director and an associate producer of Legacy Productions, a Chicago-based touring company. His Goodman credits include the Chicago premieres of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Race; The Good Negro; Proof and The Story; the world premieres of By the Music of the Spheres and The Gift Horse; James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, which transferred to Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, where it won the Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Award for Best Direction; Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun; Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky; August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; the Fats Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’; the 1993 to 1995 productions of A Christmas Carol; Crumbs From the Table of Joy; Vivisections from a Blown Mind; and The Meeting. He served as dramaturg for the world-premiere production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean at the Goodman. He directed the New York premiere of Knock Me a Kiss and The Hooch for the New Federal Theatre and the world premiere of Knock Me a Kiss at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, where his other directing credits include Master Harold and the Boys, Home, Dame Lorraine with the late Esther Rolle and Eden, for which he received a Jeff Award nomination for best direction. Regionally, Mr. Smith directed Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Birdie Blue at Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Story at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Blues for an Alabama Sky at Alabama Shakespeare Festival and The Last Season for The Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles. At Columbia College he was facilitator of the Theodore Ward Prize playwriting contest for 20 years and editor of the contest anthologies Seven Black Plays and Best Black Plays. He won a Chicago Emmy Award as associate producer/theatrical director for the NBC teleplay Crime of Innocence and was theatrical director for the Emmy Award-winning Fast Break to Glory and the Emmy Award-nominated The Martin Luther King Suite. He was a founding member of the Chicago Theatre Company, where he served as artistic director for four seasons and directed the Jeff Award-nominated Suspenders and the Jeff Award-winning musical Po’. His directing credits include productions at ETA; Black Ensemble Theater; Northlight Theatre; MPAACT; Congo Square Theatre Company; The New Regal Theater; Kuumba Theatre Company; Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre; Pegasus Players; the Timber Lake Playhouse in Mt. Carroll, Illinois; the Black Theatre Troupe in Phoenix, Arizona; He is a 2003 inductee into the Chicago State University Gwendolyn Brooks Center’s Literary Hall of Fame and a 2001 Chicago Tribune Chicagoan of the Year. He is the proud recipient of the 1982 Paul Robeson Award and the 1997 Award of Merit presented by the Black Theater Alliance of Chicago. He is currently a board member of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago.(Note: Some bio information pulled from Goodman Theatre website.)
Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice including in the year 2013 for her play Spark. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. In January 2014 In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the Julia Alvarez novel) will receive its English language premiere at San Diego Repertory Theatre under the direction of Herbert Siguenza and Todd Salovey, In development: Jarman (all this maddening beauty, a performance piece inspired by the life and work of British filmmaker Derek Jarman, with Washington D.C.-based ensemble force/collision. Among her key works are 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) and The Way of Water.
Seven of her plays are published in Instructions for Breathing and Other Plays (Seagull Books and University of Chicago Press, 2014). Five of her plays radically re-imagining ancient Greek tragedies are published in Blasted Heavens (Eyecorner Press, University of Denmark, 2012). Her works are also published by TCG, Broadway Play Publishing, Manchester University Press, Playscripts, Arte Publico Press, Smith & Kraus, Alexander Street Press, StageReads and more. Among her awards/recognitions are: Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship TCG/Pew Charitable Trusts National Theater Artist Residency at INTAR, NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Theatre Forum Latino Theatre Initiative.
She has edited several book on theatre including Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance and Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries. She sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain.
She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, Drama Editor of Asymptote literary journal, associate editor of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge,UK), contributing editor of TheatreForum, and founder of NoPassort theatre alliance and press, which recently published Todd London’s The Importance of Staying Earnest. caridadsvich.com
2002 Festival Line Up:
MFA Featured Productions:
Lemonade
by Justin Boyd
Directed by Nathan Lemoine
May 23 at 8:00PM
Synopsis: When Alison’s boyfriend proposes marriage, she can finally put twenty years of wedding preparation into action. But the perfect plan becomes pandemonium when no one – from her parents or her priest – follows orders.
Come Rain
by Sarah Zettler
Directed by David Jordan
May 25
Synopsis: In the loneliness of the spotlight, between martinis and old standards, a mother commits a sin. Years later, can she make it up to her son?
Readings:
Thursday, May 23
1:00PM She’s a Big Girl Now by Ian Mairs
3:00PM Belted Blue, Bleeding Yellow by Qui Nguyen
Friday, May 24
1:00PM The Sounds of Ice by Mark Snyder
3:00PM Artists Notes… by Addae Moon
8:00PM Roost by John Ray Sheline
Saturday, May 25
3:00PM Rest in Peace by Darcey Mesaris