2011

2011 FEATURED PLAYWRIGHT

THE WHALE by Samuel D. Hunter

Charlie hasn't seen his ex-wife or daughter in seventeen years - and in that seventeen years he has gained somewhere around 400 pounds. Now morbidly obese and confined to his small apartment, he must make a desperate attempt to connect with his disaffected teenaged daughter by doing the thing he does best-teaching her to write a good essay.

SEATED READINGS

KILGORE by Heidi Kraay

Greg was raised by his grandfather Tate. Or maybe it's the other way around. On the run from yet another one of Tate's disastrous relationship choices, the two find themselves suffocating in small-town Texas... that is until Greg falls for Katie and his dedication to Tate is pushed to its limit and all three are forced to face their past.

UP AT THE LAB by Gary Leon Hill

Sixty-six years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Los Alamos National Lab is still the largest producer of nuclear warheads in the world. It still sits on the rim of a sacred caldera and casts its shadow into the Espanola Valley onto people who work and live there. UP AT THE LAB tells the first-person story of their survival and possibly our own.

WRECKED by Mary Portser

A remote lighthouse, a warring couple-will the arrival of a mysterious sailor, the sole survivor of a wrecked ship, offer salvation or catapult them all to inevitable disaster?

THE MAKING OF A MODERN FOLK HERO by Martín Zimmerman

Having failed utterly as an actor, Renzo finally finds his calling playing superhero Volo Publicus, a character created by his former roomate, Congressman David Dover, to stop the unjust bulldozing of a public housing complex. But as Volo's popularity grows, Renzo realizes that he's not playing a superhero...he is one. A seamless blend of live actors and shadow puppets, this graphic novel for the stage stirs the passions, hopes and fears that leave us all yearning for and believing in the possibility of a superhero.

PLAYWRIGHTS INTENTSIVE PLAYS

WHALES by Bob Bartlett

Owen - a typically urban fourteen year-old - isn't interested in getting to know his long-estranged father, and he's even less interested in the secluded Outer Banks beach he calls home, so when his mother drops him off with a backpack full of medication and list of precautions, there seems to be little home that the two men will find a common ground, until an unlikely communion with an injured whale awakens in Owen a connection to his past, and a road map to his future.