Tonight at 7pm in the Schwartz Center at Emory, former Essential Theatre collaborator Patricia Henritze’s play, The Bitch of Balaclava, is being read as part of Theater Emory’s Brave New Works series.

Brave New Works is a festival of new play readings and exploratory workshops presented by the Playwriting Center of Theater Emory. Playwrights, adaptors, composers, and dramaturgs come together towork on these plays in development, with a combined company of student and professional actors.
I had the opportunity to connect with Patricia earlier this week and hear about her experience with Brave New Works, learn a little about tonight’s play,

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ESSENTIAL THEATRE ANNOUNCES TWO WINNERS FOR THE 2014 PLAYWRITING CONTEST

Atlanta, January 2014 – Essential Theatre has just announced Theroun Patterson and Karla Jennings as co-winners of the 2014 Playwriting Competition.  “It’s taken us a long while to come to a decision this year,” observes Peter Hardy, Founding Artistic Director of the theatre, “because of the large number of strong submissions we received.  But we feel that both of these plays are worthy of the prizes and will be excellent contributions to our Festival this summer.” Both playwrights will receive a $600 cash prize and a full production in this summer’s Essential Theatre Festival.

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile now, but every time I sit down to write, I get lost in the photos, my own memories and the Facebook posts from friends of Daniel’s. It’s been almost a month, and I still can’t believe we’ve done our last show together, that I’ve seen Daniel’s amazing talent onstage for the last time. This Thanksgiving, there’s a lot to give thanks for. And through the tears that still well up for a man that, let’s face it, I worked with once a year at most, I suppose it’s fitting that it took me till Thanksgiving week to be able to say it.

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In 2013 for the first time, sign language interpretation was offered as part of the Essential Theatre Festival. This was a pretty big undertaking for us – there’s a lot of work and a lot of money that goes into making this happen smoothly and well – and we were very excited to be bringing this new aspect into our festival.
To help fund the project, we participated in our first ever power2give crowdfunding project. If you’re not familiar with power2give, it’s actually pretty awesome, and you can learn more about it here. We’d started out hoping to raise money,

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Learn more about Lee Wright, author of Wednesday’s Bare Essentials offering, Fortunes of Warren.

A real live Georgia native!

Born and raised in north Georgia, I currently live in Lookout Mountain, GA (near Chattanooga, TN) with my wife, Christie, and our three-year-old son.

How did you get into writing plays?
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in junior high.  By 2007, I had written many short stories and a couple of really terrible mystery novels, but wasn’t having much luck finding homes for them.  After seeing a production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lun,

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Learn more about playwright Karen Wurl, whose play Cemetery Row is part of this year’s Bare Essentials reading series and will be read tomorrow night at 8pm.

About Karen Wurl:  
I was born in Chicago roughly a million years ago (55), and growing up I had an aunt who did theatre with the Playwrights Center at Hull House.  So although I grew up working class in the suburbs, I got to be around theatre and new plays, and I decided at an early age to be a playwright.  By high school,

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Interview with playwright Theroun Patterson

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Learn more about actor and playwright Theroun Patterson, winner of the 2011 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award and author of this Wednesday night’s Bare Essential play, That Uganda Play

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About That Uganda Play: I originally wrote the play in late 2011-early 2012 with a staged reading of the original draft with  Working Title Playwrights and Academy Theatre in January 2012.  The play started as a sort of knee jerk reaction to reading an NPR interview with David Bahati , a Ugandan Member of Parliament that introduced his Anti-Gay Legislation,

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“Connecting with Deaf Audiences” is Essential’s initiative to reach out to deaf community members and share with them the same great theatre opportunities we’ve been sharing with the hearing members of our community for the past 25 years. This initiative consists of three main elements:

1. One performance of each of the three plays that make up our festival will have sign language interpreters provided by StageHands, the premiere sign language interpreting organization for theatre in Atlanta.
2. Following each signed performance will be a Meet the Playwright talkback which will also have an interpreter, allowing deaf audience members to not only enjoy the performance but also engage with other audience members and the artists involved in the production.

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Essential Theatre is seeking a select few interns for the fall semester. If interested, please
submit a resume and cover letter to the email indicated in the internship description below. To
learn more about Essential Theatre’s mission and work, check out our website and look for us on Facebook. Class credit is available for all internships.
 
Literary Intern
We are looking for up to two literary interns to work with our artistic director to review
submissions to the 2013 Essential Theatre Playwrighting Competition.

We receive over 50 submissions each year,

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We are looking for up to three interns to assist with grant writing and fundraising development during the fall semester. Gain valuable experience finding funding sources and creating grant applications.

Interns will join  the Fundraising Committee’s biweekly meetings and will assist with the tasks that are developed from these meetings. Tasks will primarily consist of researching fundraising opportunities, ensuring that application requirements are met before applications are submitted, identifying new non-grant-based fundraising opportunities and developing and implementing other fundraising ideas. Interns will complete three webinars through the Foundation Center during the semester as well and submit a one-page review of each that includes how the webinar relates to their work with Essential.

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