The Three Rivers Arts Festival, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, presents Pittsburgh PlayWorks’ (PPW) Play Development Lab series, featuring staged readings of original plays by award-winning and emerging playwrights. From June 7th through June 14th, 2009, eight new plays will be read by professional actors, exposing the playwright’s craft and creative process for theatre professionals and audience members alike.
Six PPW playwrights, all of whom are members of the Dramatists Guild, will participate in the Festival this year. Scott Frank, aka T.S. Frank, a theatre professor and storyteller who has seen his plays produced locally, nationally and internationally, pens “Three Women,” a unique work about a selkie striving to retrieve her seals skin from two daughters who have stolen it. His academic counterpart, William Cameron, winner of the 2007 Julie Harris Playwriting Award, addresses plagiarism in “Cheating History,” wherein a disgruntled professor explores the flip side of academia upon his involvement in a cheating scheme and examines the relational effects of grief in “Not Fade Away” as shifting alliances, disintegrating intimacies and fading love corral a group of longstanding friends.
Denise Pullen, the third of three theatre professors in the core group and recipient of both state and national playwriting awards and honors, illuminates autism, more specifically the journey of a young man who upon flight from his family and in the midst of raging traffic confronts an unsuspecting saint in a sandwich suit. Sheila Kelly, a mother, wife and former psychotherapist recently on the boards with a world premiere, addresses the power struggle between fate and choice in “Runaways” during which time a group of characters exert their mental and physical powers with an eye toward maintaining their lives upon the unexpected death of their author.
Ginny Cunningham, a writer of fiction, memoir, non-fiction and plays, illuminates the life of “Mother Marian,” a nun transcending inner conflict and social condemnation in order to confront issues that define herself, her religious community, and her world during a period of historic change. Jozef Wawrzyniec Spychala, Artistic Director of Pittsburgh PlayWorks, underscores the impact of urban renewal upon a group of Pennsylvania sex workers, circa 1951, in “Chancing Liberty,” and highlights an ailing mother’s desperation as she strives to find care for her adult children, one with Tourette’s Syndrome and the other with autism, in “Stilling the Storm.”
PPW builds on the processes of theatre labs from the sixties in New York City. These groups were committed to bringing forth diverse artistic voices and positioning the collaboration of playwrights, directors and actors as vital to the development of top-quality theatrical experiences, and many in service of social justice and change.
Finally, Pittsburgh PlayWorks recognizes that the ultimate theatrical experience is one where the playwright’s words and actions as well as the characters who communicate them, the artists who actualize them, and the audience members who bear witness to them germinate and reverberate from that empathic space within our beings – the human mirror neuron system – and, as such, becomes our wellspring from which understanding, validation and change emerge and flow. Pittsburgh PlayWorks dedicates itself to fostering a playwriting collective to do just that.
Pittsburgh
By Jozef Spychala
The Three Rivers Arts Festival, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, presents Pittsburgh PlayWorks’ (PPW) Play Development Lab series, featuring staged readings of original plays by award-winning and emerging playwrights. From June 7th through June 14th, 2009, eight new plays will be read by professional actors, exposing the playwright’s craft and creative process for theatre professionals and audience members alike.
Six PPW playwrights, all of whom are members of the Dramatists Guild, will participate in the Festival this year. Scott Frank, aka T.S. Frank, a theatre professor and storyteller who has seen his plays produced locally, nationally and internationally, pens “Three Women,” a unique work about a selkie striving to retrieve her seals skin from two daughters who have stolen it. His academic counterpart, William Cameron, winner of the 2007 Julie Harris Playwriting Award, addresses plagiarism in “Cheating History,” wherein a disgruntled professor explores the flip side of academia upon his involvement in a cheating scheme and examines the relational effects of grief in “Not Fade Away” as shifting alliances, disintegrating intimacies and fading love corral a group of longstanding friends.
Denise Pullen, the third of three theatre professors in the core group and recipient of both state and national playwriting awards and honors, illuminates autism, more specifically the journey of a young man who upon flight from his family and in the midst of raging traffic confronts an unsuspecting saint in a sandwich suit. Sheila Kelly, a mother, wife and former psychotherapist recently on the boards with a world premiere, addresses the power struggle between fate and choice in “Runaways” during which time a group of characters exert their mental and physical powers with an eye toward maintaining their lives upon the unexpected death of their author.
Ginny Cunningham, a writer of fiction, memoir, non-fiction and plays, illuminates the life of “Mother Marian,” a nun transcending inner conflict and social condemnation in order to confront issues that define herself, her religious community, and her world during a period of historic change. Jozef Wawrzyniec Spychala, Artistic Director of Pittsburgh PlayWorks, underscores the impact of urban renewal upon a group of Pennsylvania sex workers, circa 1951, in “Chancing Liberty,” and highlights an ailing mother’s desperation as she strives to find care for her adult children, one with Tourette’s Syndrome and the other with autism, in “Stilling the Storm.”
PPW builds on the processes of theatre labs from the sixties in New York City. These groups were committed to bringing forth diverse artistic voices and positioning the collaboration of playwrights, directors and actors as vital to the development of top-quality theatrical experiences, and many in service of social justice and change.
Finally, Pittsburgh PlayWorks recognizes that the ultimate theatrical experience is one where the playwright’s words and actions as well as the characters who communicate them, the artists who actualize them, and the audience members who bear witness to them germinate and reverberate from that empathic space within our beings – the human mirror neuron system – and, as such, becomes our wellspring from which understanding, validation and change emerge and flow. Pittsburgh PlayWorks dedicates itself to fostering a playwriting collective to do just that.
JozefSpychalaPhD@gmail.com