Essential Theatre announces the co-winners of the 2016 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award

2016 Award Winners press release

February 2016 – Essential Theatre is proud to announce the co-winners of the 2016 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award: Karen Wurl’s Dispossessed and Derek Dixon’s When Things Are Lost.

Both plays will receive full productions in the 2016 Essential Theatre Festival and a cash prize. Now in its sixteenth year, the Essential Theatre Playwriting Competition is the only contest exclusively dedicated to the work of Georgia playwrights.

Says Essential’s Artistic Director,

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Working Title Playwrights presents their second FIRST LIGHT reading of the year as part of the brand new FIRST LIGHT Series on February 22, Jill Patrick’s THE MEANTIME, at Actor’s Express Theatre.

ABOUT THE FIRST LIGHT SERIES
Playwrights that are ready to see a play on its feet for the first time request a reading under the lights. Working Title provides a space, a director, a stage manager and marketing support. 

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Playing Feb 12-27 at Out of Box Theatre, Two Rooms by Lee Blessing is about an American professor at a university in Beirut who is captured by a militant faction and held in a tiny cell for three years. Back in the United States, his wife has “cleansed” his former office by removing everything from it. She spends most of her time there to share in his experience as much as she can. She is torn between a journalist intent to tell her story to the public and a State Department official who wants to keep her quiet.

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Now through February 21, long-time Essential Theatre artist Lauren Gunderson’s play I and You is playing at Aurora Theatre in Gwinnett County.

Lauren has been with Essential since 1999, when she was cast in the first ever Essential Theatre Festival as an actor. Two years later, she won the first-ever Essential Theatre Playwriting Award. And now, she lives in L.A. and writes plays that are produced all over the world: just weeks after I and You closes at Aurora, The Revolutionists opens at 7Stages, and Theatrical Outfit’s production of her play Silent Sky was the talk of the town last year.

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JOIN ESSENTIAL THEATRE AND FRIENDS ON FEBRUARY 29 AT RED BRICK BREWERY FOR OUR 2016 FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENT EVENT!

Meet the co-winners of the 2016 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award and the directors of their WORLD PREMIERE PRODUCTIONS.

Mix and mingle with past Essential playwrights and company members.

Win prizes and just plain have fun with Essential Trivia by Trivial Matters!

Sample great beer from Georgia’s oldest operating craft brewery, Red Brick Brewing.
Brewery Tours at 7 and 8pm! Gluten-free beverage options (ie, wine) generously provided by Ansley Wine Merchants.

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Click here to read more, or sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of the page to receive our newsletter directly!

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Since writing MISS SMALL TOWN U.S.A. and submitting it to the Essential Theatre Playwriting Competition, Gerry Bartholomei has fulfilled a long-time dream of moving to New York. Weather permitting, he’ll be joining us on Tuesday night for our Bare Essentials reading, however.

Read on to learn about the play we’ll be hearing Tuesday night and what Gerry has been up to since our last interview with him in 2014:

Tell us a little bit about your play.
MISS SMALL TOWN U.S.A. is the story of two old friends who reconnect after the husband of one them is arrested for his involvement in a sex traffic affair.

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“No one is safe, no gender, race, background, or social economic status.”

ATLANTA, GA – Atlanta based company Karibu Performance Arts presents the World Premiere of Mia Kristin Smith’s Kept, January 22-24 and 29-31, 2016 at the West End Performing Arts Center. Kept follows the story of “Seth”, who wants outs the family business and deals with race, poverty, and sex trafficking in the city of Atlanta.

The synopsis reads: “When most young boys dream of being The Avengers or famous pro athletes, “Seth” had a very different reverie aligned for him,

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Essential Theatre first produced a play by Theroun Patterson in 2011, A Thousand Circlets. Winner of that year’s Essential Theatre Playwriting Award and enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike,  Circlets went on to a second production at Detroit Repertory in 2013. The premiere of this play was an early milestone in actor-turned-playwright Theroun Patterson’s transition, and since that time he has continued writing prolifically and successfully and has come to be an important voice in the burgeoning Atlanta playwrights’ scene.

Today we want to take a moment to appreciate how far he’s come,

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Miss Small Town USA
BY GERRY L. BARTHOLOMÄI
JANUARY 26, 2016
7:30PM
WEST END PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
945 RALPH DAVID ABERNATHY BLVD, ATLANTA, GA
DIRECTED BY PETER HARDY
FEATURING THE READING TALENTS OF SUZANNE ROUSH AND LINDY WOOD
“Two old friends look back on their lives and wonder how the hell they got here.”

Click here to read our 2014 interview with the playwright, here to read about what he’s been up to since 2014 and here to find out about the Jan 28 $10 Industry Night for the current production onstage at West End,

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