by Jennifer Kimball
2015 Festival Highlights.pdf 

Our seventeenth Festival, the fourth all-Georgia Festival, our second year partnering with the West End Performing Arts Center and with Eyedrum Art & Music to showcase a local visual artist and further support Georgia artists of all kinds.

Two great and well-received world premieres by two talented and gracious Georgia Playwrights,

Our best-attended Bare Essentials Play Reading Series ever — despite a power outage during one reading as the result of an afternoon thunderstorm.

And we’re making good on a promise that’s a long time coming,  to produce Bare Essentials readings outside of the Festival as well, with our first reading of the fall coming up this Wednesday, September 30.

Praise from audience and critics alike!

“The Old Ship of Zion is good story telling, simply done with moments of great beauty.”

“I’m definitely coming back and bringing friends.”

“A well-written, superbly acted drama which touched just about every emotion…

I encourage all Atlanta theatre goers to take the opportunity to see this. You’ll be glad you did.”

“Sometimes, a work of theatre cloaks itself in the paradigms and tropes of Biblical Axioms, and, if it ‘reaches out and grabs my heart,’ attention must be paid. Such a work is Natalia Naman’s The Old Ship of Zion, a play filled with faith and testimony, but also filled with characters and incident and self-examining doubt and questioning.”

“A totally ‘now’ production.”  

“Tara definitely likes it.”

“a well-written, superbly acted drama which touched just about every emotion…I encourage all Atlanta theatre goers to take the opportunity to see this. You’ll be glad you did.”

“If the other two readings were as sterling as the one by Diane Dexter last night, the audience will be in for a real treat.” –Hank Kimmel

“The Essential Theatre Play Festival produces theatre unlike anywhere else in Atlanta. Almost 30 years running, it creates a vital opportunity for us to experience stories that demand to be heard.”   -TK Hadman, Edge Media Network

“[Peter Hardy’s] choices are diverse in the very best way – playwrights, topics, and casting, and I applaud his integrity and ability to make these happen.”   -Ann Neff

On a Personal Note

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Essential Marketplace or bought a hat before The Old Ship of Zion. All proceeds will be donated to the Jo Howarth Noonan Foundation for the Performing Arts.

The donation will be made in honor of Jo and of Sharon Cage Allen Mansfield, whom audiences loved this summer as Mama Gwen in The Old Ship of Zion and who passed away on September 27.

 We are proud and blessed to have had them both grace our stage, Jo regularly over the course of several years, and Sharon this summer for the first and final time.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this summer’s festival possible:

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