About id theater
what is id?
Danette Baker, Mary Portser and Sheila McDevitt in Paper
Dolls by Timothy Braatz, 2006 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference (photo by Sara Jessup)
id also believes that new plays need the time and space to be developed outside of the pressures of a full production. Working chiefly in McCall, Idaho and New York City, id provides a safe place for artists (professional, emerging, amateur & student) to develop work, take risks and introduce audiences to adventurous new works that reflect, challenge and celebrate them.
id is theater that doesn’t produce plays?
Sounds a bit counter-intuitive? But the fact that we aren’t doing full productions doesn’t mean that we’re not presenting work. In 2008 id presented 21 plays! We did it by forgoing elaborate production values, theater rental or ticket sales (we don’t sell tickets for anything), so we can stay focused on the process rather than the product; offering writers the time and space they need to take their work to the next level.
who's who
- Jeni Mahoney co-Artistic Director id Theater & Artistic Director of Seven Devils Playwrights Conference
- Sheila McDevitt co-Artistic Director id Theater & Artistic Director of Playwrights Intensive and NYC Sit In!
- Paula A. Marchiel Managing Director & Company Management
- Ed Baker Production Manager & Actor
In addition to her duties at id, Jeni is a playwright, teacher, producer and all around development geek. Her plays including The Feast of the Flying Cow. and Other Stories of War, Mercy Falls, The Martyrdom of Washington Booth, Running in Circles Screaming, Come Rain or Come Shine, Kandahar, Light and Gogli Mogli have been variously presented at the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center, InterAct Theater (Philly), Source Theater Festival (D.C.), L.A. Theater Center, MidWest New Play Festival (Chicago), Lark Theater's Playwrights Week, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, NYU's hotINK Festival, And Toto Too (Denver), Circus Theatricals (L.A.) and London's Greenwich Playhouse among others. Published plays include: Come Rain or Come Shine (Applause); Throw of the Moon (written with Ben Sahl) and American Eyes (NYTE); Light (Playscripts & Applause) and Running in Circles Screaming (Applause). Jeni speaks on the subject of play development whenever she can find a platform to do so, she twice served as a panelist for the Dramatists Guild's DG Academy, recently served as mentor and guest artist at the Ohio University's Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwriting Festival, and has been featured in articles in Stage Directions Magazine, The Dramatists and The Loop. She is a member of Dramatists Guild of America.
A native Idahoan, is co-founder and co-Artistic Director of id Theater. She co-created id's Seven Devils Playwrights Festival of which she is the Director of the Playwrights Intensive. Also for id Theater Sheila is the Artistic Director of their NYC Sit In! and Bridgeworks projects. Directing: 2 season's of Manhattan Class Company's "Summer Play Party", featuring plays written by New York City high school students; Yorkshire Faerie Tale by Tom Diggs and Jay D'Amico at Mind-the-Art Entertainment, NYC, Knuckleheads by James McLindon at the Samuel French OOB Short Play Fest - numerous Seven Devils and NYC Sit In! readings including John Olive's A Slaying Song Tonight and Eric Coble's The Velocity of Autumn. Acting: Sheila's first professional acting job was when she was 15 as an Irish maid for a filmstrip by "Parents Magazine" - shot in Teddy Roosevelt's birthplace in Manhattan. NE tour of Dancing at Lughnasa/Weston Playhouse, Jupiter Theater, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Idaho Rep., Lewis and Clark Repertory Theater, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, id Theater and numerous showcases. Sheila also had the pleasure of Understudying Ms. Carol Kane in In Betweens off Broadway, even though we never actually opened!!
Paula has been with Seven Devils and id Theater since the first Conference in 2001. She recently worked as Production Coordinator on two short films for the comedy troupe BOOBY HATCH. She is an active company member of Synaesthetic Theater for whom she was Producer of The Empires New Clothes on Theater Row and Company Manager of The Trial of K both at the Culture Project and at the International Arts Festival in Salamanca Spain. She is Marketing Associate and Technology Officer for TheatreworksUSA. Other past work includes the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, New York University, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, the Really Useful Management Company and Stage Management jobs too numerous to mention. She is a graduate of Tisch School of the Arts at NYU
Ed
earned his MFA Degree in Acting from Ohio University's Professional Actor
Training Program in 1991. He worked regionally at The Cleveland Playhouse,
Cleveland Actors' theater, The Monomoy theater on Cape Cod, as well as
6 insane years performing in New York with the Cut And Paste Company and
Others. In 1998 Ed returned to Wichita with his lovely wife, Danette Baker.
Since then he has had the honor of performing in a special benefit production
of Last Train To Nibroc for Wichita Summer theater with the most
special Guest Star of his life, Danette. Ed recently joined the faculty
of Wichita State University School of Performing Arts as an Assistant Professor
of Technical theater.how did id happen?
id started out in 1997 as an actor-driven company. In its first seasons, id produced plays in McCall, Idaho and then moved them to New York - so the idea of bridging communities (rural/urban, mountain/coastal) has been a part of id from the beginning. And id has always had an active interest in and commitment to new works.
In 2000, id was struggling to figure out where to find great new plays. Enter Jeni Mahoney of Quickly Bones Artists Collective who, like id’s Sheila McDevitt, lived in New York and had a summer home near McCall, Idaho. Jeni, approached Sheila with the idea of a co-production: a Conference of new works in McCall. They reached out to Paula Marchiel, whose work at the National Playwrights Conference provided the organizational and managerial skills such an ambitious project would need; and Judy Anderson, an Alpine Playhouse board member and playwriting teacher at the local High School... and in June 2001, the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference was born.
The first year of the Conference was a co-production of Quickly Bones and id, with the Alpine Playhouse donating theater space. From the very beginning, we all knew it worked and we wanted the Conference to continue, but as time passed the exact nature of the id/Seven Devils/Alpine Playhouse relationship remained somewhat fluid (hey, we’re all about process). Eventually, Jeni joined Sheila as co-Artistic Director of id, and the Alpine Playhouse became the “sponsor” of the Conference.
This simplified things for the Conference which had become id’s central, and in some years, only project, but the question remained: what was id without the Conference? And what was the Conference without id?
With the 2007 launch of Bridgeworks and Sit In! we finally discovered what, at heart, we had already become: an organization committed to developing and nurturing new plays. Our projects: Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, with it’s Playwrights Intensive program of sit-down readings and annual playwriting workshop in McCall; Bridgeworks which supports member artists (who have come to us through Seven Devils) as they take their plays out into the world and Sit In!, which provides a venue in NYC for our artists to hear post-Conference re-writes, reach out to producers or share new works, offer us the opportunity to make connections and create bridges between and amongst playwrights & other artists (professional, student and amateur); communities; theater companies and audiences from the rural mountains of Idaho to the hustling, bustling shores of New York.
For more information on the plays we’ve developed visit our development history page.
our donors
id theater, the seven devils playwrights conference, bridgeworks and sit in! are all made possible thanks to the generous support of:
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| The Richard K. and Shirley S. Hemingway Foundation |