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2011 Conference

June 8 - 18, 2011 at the Alpine Playhouse in McCall Idaho (map)

Featuring 2011 Guest Artist Samuel D. Hunter

The Schedule

All staged readings start at 7:30pm at the Alpine Playhouse unless otherwise noted

FREE OF CHARGE

Wednesday, June 8: THE WHALE by Saumel D. Hunter

Thursday, June 9: From McCall-Donnelly High School
GOD'S PLAY by Holly Moss
OCULOS by Andrea Sylvia-Clarno

Friday, June 10: KILGORE by Heidi Kraay

Saturday, June 11: UP AT THE LAB by Gary Leon Hill

Wednesday, June 15: WHALES by Bob Bartlett *

Thursday, June 16: From McCall-Donnelly High School
HELLO AGAIN by Mary Parker
12 KINDS OF STUPID by Alex Allen

Friday, June 17: THE MAKING OF A MODER FOLK HERO by Martín Zimmerman

Saturday, June 18 at 2:00pm: PEACEFUL MEN by Megan Thornton **

Saturday, June 18 at 7:30pm: WRECKED by Mary Portser

*Sit-down Reading
**Sit-down Reading @ Idaho First Bank

 

SPECIAL EVENT :

Saturday, June 11th from 11:00am-2:00pm

An Intensive Playwrighting Workshop with Guest Artist Samuel D. Hunter

Idaho First Bank

The 2011 Plays

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.

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, 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 pussibly our own.

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.

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.

PEACEFUL MEN by Megan Thornton* (*Sit-down Reading / Idaho First Bank .)

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 2011 Playwrights

Bob Bartlett (Whales) 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 , 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 .

Gary Leon Hill (Up At The Lab) 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 AT&T OnStage Production Grant for  Back to the Blanket   at Denver Center Theater, 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 (Guest Playwright The Whale ) Sam'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 (Kilgore) 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 premiered at 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 she 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 (Wrecked) Mary 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 workshopped 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 BankCafé 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.

Megan Thornton ( Peaceful Men ) Megan is an MFA candidate in dramatic writing at the University of Idaho.  She's delighted to be back for her second summer with Seven Devils.

Martín Zimmerman (The Making of a Modern Folk Hero) 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.

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