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2011 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference
All Events at the Alpine Playhouse (unless otherwise noted)
All events Free
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Wednesday, June 8
7:30pm - THE WHALE by Samuel D. Hunter: Charlie hasn’t seen his ex-wife or daughter in seventeen years—and in that time he’s gained around 400 pounds. Confined to his small apartment, an ailing Charlie makes a desperate attempt to connect with his disaffected teen-aged daughter by doing the thing he does best — teaching her to write a good essay.
Thursday, June 9
7:30pm - PLAYS FROM McCALL-DONNELLY HIGH SCHOOL
Friday, June 10
7:30pm 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, pushing his dedication to Tate to its limit and forcing all three to face their pasts.
Saturday, June 11
11:00am - FREE PLAYWRITING WORKSHOP with Samuel D. Hunter - Space limited for this special event. Email jeni@idtheater.org to reserve your slot. Location: TBA in McCall.7:30pm - 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 the people who work and live there. Up At The Lab tells the first-person story of their survival and possibly our own.
Wednesday, June 15
7:30pm - 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 hope that the two men will find a common ground, until an unlikely communion with an injured whale awakens in Owen a forgotten connection to his own past, and path to his future.
Thursday, June 16
7:30pm - PLAYS FROM McCALL-DONNELLY HIGH SCHOOL
Friday, June 17
7:30pm - THE MAKING OF A MODERN FOLK HERO by Martín Zimmerman: Having failed as an actor, Renzo Rafaeli finally finds his calling playing superhero Volo Publicus, a character created by his former roommate, Congressman David Dover, to stop the bulldozing of a public housing complex. But as Volo’s popularity grows, Renzo realizes he’s not just playing a superhero…he is one. A seamless blend of live actors and shadow puppets, this graphic novel for the stage stirs our yearning to believe in the possibility of a superhero, and our fear of what happens when a hero outgrows its creator.
Saturday, June 18
2:00pm - FLIGHT by Patrick Gabridge: Sarah spends her days in the airport, finding comfort in its organized chaos, forced anonymity, and careful security. But when her game is discovered - first by a fellow squatter, then a janitor and finally a TSA supervisor– Sarah makes a fateful choice to stay in the airport, whatever the cost. Little does she know that beneath its clean and shining façade, the airport – like the world outside it – is littered with lives torn apart by loss. Caught in the crossfire of the airport’s lost souls, Sarah discovers there is no such thing as an innocent escape.
7:30pm - 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?ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS:
Bob Bartlett: In December Bob completed the MFA in Playwriting at Catholic University of America where his thesis Whales was directed by Gregg Henry. His full-length plays Fallout, and kuchu uganda and Death by Hibachi recently had readings at the Baltimore Playwright’s Festival and the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival, respectively, and his short play fire, paper had a reading at Theatre J. Whales won runner-up for both ACTF’s The David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award and The Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting. A freelance director in the Washington, DC area, he just directed Athol Fugard’s MASTER HAROLD … and the Boys for Quotidian Theatre Company. Next up – directing Fugard’s The Island for the Capital Fringe Festival, Dave Holstein’s wicked comedy The B-Team for Landless Theatre Company, and helming an evening of site-specific shorts staged in a downtown DC laundromat for his company AccokeekCreek, written by playwrights from the Washington, DC area and from Wales and the UK. A career-changer, Bob is the most recent addition to the theatre faculty at Bowie State University in Maryland where he teaches directing and a variety of theatre courses.
Patrick Gabridge: Patrick’s plays have been produced across the U.S. , as well as in Canada, Mexico, England, and Australia. His full-length plays include Fire on Earth, Constant State of Panic, Pieces of Whitey, Blinders, and Reading the Mind of God. He’s currently a Huntington Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company. He’s deeply involved in the Boston theatre community, with work produced and developed by 18 different companies the Boston area, including a commission from the Underground Railway Theatre. Patrick co-founded Boston’s Rhombus writers’ group in 2003, and also started the on-line Playwright Submission Binge (a marketing group with nearly 600 members), the Chameleon Stage theatre (Denver), the Bare Bones Theatre Company (New York), and the newsletter, Market InSight for Playwrights. His plays are published by Playscripts, Brooklyn Publishers, Heuer, Original Works, YouthPlays, and Smith & Kraus. He’s also the author of one published novel, Tornado Siren and is a longtime member of the Dramatists Guild.
Gary Leon Hill has received grants from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation Playwrights Fellowship, the National Theatre Artist Residency Grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, an OnStage Production Grant from AT&T, and multiple commissions. Hill’s first play, Food from Trash, won the Great American Playwriting Contest at Actors Theatre of Louisville and was directed by Jon Jory in the Humana Festival. Say Grace, directed by David Dower, received the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for Best Original Script and ran for four months at The Magic Theatre. Other plays include The Black Branch, Watch Your Back, Soundbite, The Real Cheese, Back to the Blanket, In a Beginning, Lorelie Shebang, and 8 Bob Off. His book, People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead, published by WeiserBooks, received the Diagram Group’s “Oddest Book Title of the Year” award—full title: How People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What To Do About It.
Samuel D. Hunter’s plays include A Bright New Boise (OBIE Award, Drama Desk Nomination, Outstanding Play; New York Magazine’s Top 10 Theater Productions of 2010; upcoming production at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Fall 2011), The Whale (upcoming premiere at the Denver Center in Winter 2012), Norway (Phoenix Theatre of Indianapolis; Boise Contemporary Theater), Jack's Precious Moment (Page 73 Productions at 59E59), Five Genocides (Clubbed Thumb at the Ohio Theater), I Am Montana (Arcola Theatre, London; Mortar Theater, Chicago). His plays have been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, PlayPenn, Ojai Playwrights Conference, the Lark Playwrights Workshop, Juilliard, LAByrinth, Rattlestick, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, 24Seven Lab and elsewhere. Internationally, his work has been translated into Spanish and presented in Mexico City and Monterrey, and he has worked in the West Bank with Ashtar Theatre of Ramallah and Ayyam al-Masrah of Hebron. At Ashtar, he co-wrote The Era of Whales which was performed in Ramallah and Istanbul. Awards: 2008-2009 PONY Fellowship from the Lark, two Lincoln Center Le Compte du Nuoy Awards, others. He is a member of Partial Comfort Productions and the Civilians' R&D Writing Group and is an alum of Ars Nova’s Playgroup. He has taught at Fordham University, Rutgers University, Marymount Manhattan College and The University of Iowa. A native of northern Idaho, Sam lives in New York City. He holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Juilliard.
Heidi Kraay writes plays, poetry, stories and arts columns and works in theatre and music production. She lives in Boise, Idaho, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts from Boise State University and recently performed her monologue play Survivors. In 2010 and 2009 she performed two other one-woman plays Carny Veil and Mere Ending, all three of which premieredat Boise art galleries. Her play Robots in the Ring featuring music-as-dialogue premiered at the Boise Creative and Improvise Music Festival in 2009 and other play titles include Shadows, The Monster in the Bookstore and Devour Your Ultimatum. She has worked in multiple technical capacities for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Texas Shakespeare Festival, Boise Contemporary Theater, the Visual Arts Collective and multiple fringe theatres in the Boise area. Currently she loves working for musician Thomas Paul, working backstage at the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts and as prop master for Opera Idaho. Heidi's poetry has been published by Oedipus Text, the Used Gravitrons and Cobble Magazine and often writes articles celebrating performing arts in Boise, which have appeared in numerous online news pages. She frequently collaborates with musicians in poetic-music creations and with the multimedia, boundary-pushing Collapse Theatre and is always looking forward to her next creative endeavor.
Mary Portser is the 2004 recipient of the “New Voices in American Theatre Award” from the William Inge Theatre. Her play, MOIRA, was produced by the Fishamble Theatre Company in Dublin, Ireland in 2003. HOMESPUN won Ensemble Studio Theatre–the L.A. Project’s 2007 “Best of the Fest”. HOMESPUN and YOU DON’T KNOW ME have both been work shopped at Seven Devils. THE TRAIN IN MY HOTEL, NO TIME FOR WOMEN and ANIMAL LIFE have been part of EST the L.A. Project’s Winterfests. GRAINNE was a finalist at the O’Neill. MISS MARTIN’S MOUTH was the winner of the Los Angeles City College One Act Play Festival‘96 and was produced there. Theatre West produced STOPGAP and DISTRESS SIGNALS, a series of comic monologues performed by the author. For seven years Mary wrote and performed with a comedy group, THE PARANOIDS, at the West Bank Café and Catch A Rising Star in New York and at the Kenyon Festival Theater in Ohio. SAVE THE LOOPHOLES, culled from Paranoids material, was produced at the Judith Anderson Theater on Theater Row in New York. Several of her monologues are included in the AUDITION ARSENAL series, published by Smith and Kraus. Mary is also an actress, most recently appearing in Eric Coble’s VELOCITY OF AUTUMN at Boise Contemporary Theatre, as well as various films and TV shows. She’s written a novel, SQUAWK and is working on a second.
Martín Zimmerman is a multi-ethnic, bilingual playwright with plays produced or developed at The Kennedy Center, The Playwrights' Center, the Alliance Theatre, Primary Stages (NYC), Theatre Row (NYC), Borderlands Theater (Tucson, AZ), the Source Festival (Washington, DC), Red Tape (Chicago), The University of Texas at Austin, and Duke University, and with upcoming projects at The Gift (Chicago), and the Source Festival. A recipient of the Carl Djerassi Playwriting Fellowship at UW-Madison, the National New Play Network's Smith Prize, and a Core Apprenticeship at The Playwrights’ Center, Martín has been a finalist for the Kendeda Competition, the Jerome Fellowship, the Heideman Award, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He has also been a semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Playwrights Conference, The Julie Harris Playwright Award, and the WordBridge Playwrights Lab. MFA in Playwriting: The University of Texas at Austin. BA in Theater Studies, BS in Economics: Duke University.