Essential Theatre seeks two volunteer ushers for each performance. This year’s festival run July 5 through August 5, 2012 but those who sign-up early will have their choice of performances.

Simply follow the link to our OvationTix calendar and select USHER and you will be taken to a page to sign-up. Choose one or two $0 tickets. Ushers are asked to please arrive 60 minutes prior to curtain time. Preferred dress is black skirt or slacks and white shirt. After the performance, we ask that you assist in cleaning up inside the theatre space.

Parking is free at Essential Theatre @ Actors Express. 

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Win a walk-on role in Jordan Pulliam’s Bat-Hamlet, a comic book re-telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet!

To Enter:
Simply follow the link to our OvationTix calendarand select BAT-HAMLET WALK ON RAFFLE tickets and you will be taken to a page to sign up. Only 25 raffle tickets are available per performance date, so get yours now! Purchase of a raffle ticket does NOT reserve you a seat in the audience. If you would like to attend a performance, you will need to purchase regularly priced tickets as well.

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ESSENTIAL THEATRE FLEXPASS IS A WIN-WIN OPPORTUNITY
For a Short Time Additional Savings with Early Purchase
You know you’re going to come see at least one play during Essential Theatre Festival. This year we feature world premieres exclusively written by Georgia playwrights. When you buy a six or ten ticket FlexPass now, you save even more~ up to $60 with the FlexPass 6 and up to $110. How can we do this you ask? Well, the FlexPass is a win-win situation. You lock in your savings now and can use your tickets on any date and in any combination you like and the funds pass through helping us fund the festival.

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2012 Essential Theatre Festival 
more info at http://bit.ly/2012_Auditions 

Evelyn in Purgatory
byTopher Payne, director Betty Hart
Five public school teachers are caught in the limbo of the disciplinary “Rubber Room”, waiting for their cases to be heard and their fates decided. Poignant and funny, it’s like The Breakfast Club for teachers, as they share secrets with each other and begin to look into their own hearts. Winner of the 2012 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award. 

Bat-Hamlet
by Jordan Pulliam, director Peter Hardy 

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Just a reminder — the Essential Theatre is accepting short plays to be considered for this summer’s THE LOCAL project.  We want plays set at specific locations in Atlanta, and we’re accepting submissions through Jan. 15.  You can e-mail submissions to [email protected].  The plays can be in any style, can be realistic or not, and be set in the past or the present.  We’re hoping to get submissions about as many different real places in Atlanta as possible.  This project is meant to about Atlanta, the place we live, written by the people who live here.

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The Essential Theatre invites Georgia writers to submit short plays to be considered for THE LOCAL, a collaborative theatre project about the City of Atlanta to be developed and directed by Ellen McQueen, for production in the next Essential Theatre Play Festival (coming up in the summer of 2012).  A similar project is currently in development by Stagewrights, a company in Tampa, Florida.

All plays must be set at a specific location in the Metropolitan Atlanta area, and all of them must, in some way, touch upon the subject of homelessness.  The scripts do not have to be about the homeless (although they can be) and do not have to have homeless characters onstage (although they can). 

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We’re proud and happy to announce that the Essential Theatre’s production of Rita Dove’s THE DARKER FACE OF THE EARTH, directed by Betty Hart, has won the Metropolitan Atlanta Theater Award for Best Ensemble In A Play.  This is the thirteenth MAT Award that the Essential Theatre was won in the past four years.

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SALLY AND GLEN AT THE PALACE, written by Essential’s Artistic Director Peter Hardy, will be given a staged reading at the Tallapoosa Theatre Festival (located west of Atlanta) on August 27.  For more information
SALLY AND GLEN was a big hit with both critics and audiences when it was produced as part of the 2010 Essential Theatre Play Festival, ending up on “Best of the Year” lists for both The Sunday Paper and Atlanta Theater Buzz, while Hardy was Creative Loafing’s Critic’s Pick for Best Atlanta Playwright.

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