ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS

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Kia Corthron was the 2017 resident playwright of Chicago’s Eclipse Theatre, which produced three of her plays. Other plays produced in NYC by Playwrights Horizons, EST, NYTW, Atlantic, MTC; in London by Royal Court, Donmar Warehouse; regionally at Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre, ATL/Humana, Taper, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Yale Rep, NYS&F, Baltimore's Center Stage, Goodman, Hartford Stage, elsewhere. Awards include the Windham Campbell Prize, USArtists Jane Addams Fellowship, Simon Great Plains Playwright Award, McKnight National Residency. TV: "The Jury," "The Wire." The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Dramatists Guild Council, New Dramatists alumnus.

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Marcus Gardley is a proud Oakland-born playwright-poet whom the New Yorker calls “the heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams.” His play, X or The Nation V. Betty Shabazz was a New York Times Critic Pick and was remounted off-Broadway in the Spring of 2018. His play The House That Will Not Stand won a 2019 Obie award and opened Off-Broadway in the summer of 2018 to rave reviews and a sold-out extension with 8 AUDELCO nominations, winning 4 including Best Play. It is now being adapted into a motion picture written by Gardley. He is the recipient of the 2019 Doris Duke Artist Award and the 2019 San Francisco Library Laureate Award. Gardley received the 2018 Guiding Light Award presented by Cal Shakes and won the 2017 Special Citation Theater Award for his play Black Odyssey, which swept the Theater Bay Area Awards garnering 6 other prizes including Best Production and a special playwriting award. He is the 2015 Glickman Award for The House That Will Not Stand and the 2013 USA James Baldwin Fellow. He was the 2011 PEN Laura Pels award winner for Mid-Career Playwright. His work has been produced across the country with several productions in England and France. Currently, Gardley is writing a biopic about Marvin Gaye produced by Dr. Dre, a film adaptation of Twelve Angry Men developed at HBO and a television show at F/X.

 

Kate Abbruzzese is an alum of Vassar College and NYU's MFA Graduate Acting Program. She has acted in many of Shakespeare's plays and has imagined his characters’ lives beyond the page in several other works for the stage. She also moonlights as a cartoonist and illustrator.

 

Terry Glaser, adjunct professor at the University of San Diego, is a playwright, translator, librettist, stage director, actress, and acting teacher. She has worked both in academia and the professional theatre for over 30 years. Her writing includes translation/adaptations of classic plays and operas, including The Frogs, A Flea in Her Ear, The Surprise of Love, Croquefer, and Orfeo. Her original dramatic works include the Commedia dell'arte farce The Dentist, and solo shows in which she performs the life stories of playwrights, including The Mysterious Dwarf (Gogol), and Chekhov, Live! (Chekhov). Ms. Glaser has served as stage director for over 50 productions across the country and has performed her solo shows and conducted master classes at the University of Virginia, the University of Kansas, Syracuse University, and Point Loma Nazarene University. Ms. Glaser holds a B.A. in Playwriting from Brown University and an M.A. in Theatre (Directing) from Syracuse University.

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Eric Pfeffinger is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America east. His plays have been produced by the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Denver Theatre Center, Geva Theatre Center, Phoenix Theatre, the InterAct, 16th Street Theatre, Source Festival, City Theatre of Miami, the One-Minute Play Festival, and elsewhere. He's written new plays on commissions from the Signature Theatre, the InterAct, Imagination Stage, and the Bloomington Playwrights Project. He's developed new work with PlayPenn, Page 73, the Lark Playwrights Week, the Colorado New Play Summit, the Orlando Shakes PlayFest, Chicago Dramatists, and others. His plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Dramatics Magazine, Steele Spring, HowlRound, and Indie Theater Now.

 

Bridgette Dutta Portman is a playwright based in Fremont, CA. Dozens of her short plays have been produced locally, across the country and overseas. Her work was featured in Red Bull Theater's Short New Play Festivals in 2014 and 2016. Her full-length plays include The Widow of Sisyphus (semi-finalist, 2011 O'Neill Playwrights' Conference), La Fee Verte (Acadiana Repertory Theatre, 2016), Caeneus & Poseidon (Dragon Theatre, 2017), Ageless (Quantum Dragon Theatre, 2017), and The Mourner (Custom Made Theatre, 2018). She has been a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights' Festival, the PlayPenn Conference, the Garry Marshall New Works Festival, the Kentucky Women’s Theatre Conference Prize for Women Writers, and the New Dramatists playwrights' residency.  She is past president of the Playwrights' Center of San Francisco, a founding member of Same Boat Theatre Collective, and a member of the Pear Writers' Guild and the Dramatists' Guild. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University. Learn more about her plays at www.bridgetteduttaportman.com.

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Sofya Levitsky-Weitz is a current Jerome Fellow and incoming Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center and a member of EST/Youngblood. Plays developed with NYTW, UCF’s Pegasus PlayLab, Williamstown, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Steep Theatre, the Sam French OOB Festival, the Flea, Chicago Dramatists, and more. Finalist for the Heideman Award, semi-finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, the Playwrights’ Realm Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award and Premiere Stages. Published by The Kenyon Review, the 53rd State Press, & (twice) in The Dionysian. She’s the official annual playwriting judge for Hendrix College’s playwriting competition and got her MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage at Northwestern University. www.sofyaweitz.com

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David Lerner Schwartz is the upcoming writer in residence at St. Albans in Washington, DC. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he was a recipient of the MFA Alumni Writer's Grant and a bachelor's from Tufts University with high honors. His work has been published in New York magazine, Quartz, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. He serves as an assistant fiction editor at Four Way Review and previously taught design at Parsons. davidlernerschwartz.com

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Matthew Wells is a Thailand-based playwright whose productions include Schrödinger's Girlfriend (EST Sloan Grant; Magic Theatre, San Francisco; Act II Playhouse, Ambler PA); Oscar and Adonis (2000 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival One-Act Play Award); Scarlet Woman (2011 Frigid Festival, NYC; Edmonton Fringe; Winnipeg Fringe; Gremlin Theatre, St. Paul); Beautiful Day (finalist, 2013 Lark Playwrights Week; Actors Theatre of Charlotte's 2016 nuVoices Festival; fourth prize, 2016 Hope & Optimism Competition); Countrie Matters (2015 Great Plains Theatre Conference); Romeo and Rosaline (2015 Red Bull Theater Short Play Festival); Elvis at Auschwitz (Nylon Fusion); Barabbas (semi-finalist, 2017 National Playwrights Conference) and Falstaff In Love (Finalist, First Round and Second Round, 2018 Shakespeare's New Contemporaries).

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