Congratulations to this summer’s casts for the 2016 Essential Theatre Festival!
When Things Are Lost, by Derek Dixon, directed by Amber Bradshaw
Kerwin Thompson, Alex Towers, Anthony Goolsby, Alex Van, Jill Perry, Barrett Doyle, Chelsea Steverson and Gina Rickicki
and
Dispossessed, by Karen Wurl, directed by Peter Hardy
Amelia Fischer, Jake Krakofsky, Kathleen McManus, Scott Rousseau, Alyssa Caputo, Chris Schulz, Christie Vozniak, Tony Larkin and Jacob McKee
The Essential Theatre will hold General Auditions for its 2016 season on March 19, from 12:30 – 5:30 p.m. We’ll be seeing people in the Atlanta Jugglers’ Association room in the Little Five Points Community Center (where Horizon Theatre is located) at 1083 Austin Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30307.
Please bring headshot and resume and prepare two contrasting monologs whose total running time will be no more than four minutes. For an appointment time, e-mail Peter Hardy.
Co-winner of the 2016 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, Karen Wurl is a playwright, dramaturg, director, teacher, and semi-retired slam poet. She’s spent half her life in Chicago, half her life in Atlanta, and the extra bits in Michigan, Wisconsin and Texas. Her plays include Transference, Kim’s Theory about the Struggle Between Good and Evil, Only Children, The Play about Frank, Death or Serious Injury Can Occur, The Secret Life of the Proletariat, Miss Macbeth, Vampires, Now and at the Hour Of, Daughter of Fate: The True Story of a Caterer, In Which I Lose My Virginity to My Best Friend’s Older Brother,
Co-winner of the 2016 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, Derek Dixon originally hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He studied at Marymount Manhattan College and acting at the The Terry Schreiber Studio in New York. He’s performed in plays including The Lion in Winter, Romeo and Juliet, and The Boys In The Band and has written several full length plays in the last five years, including Homewrecker, Red Snow, Pictures of People, Work of Art, and Green Light. In 2015 he joined Working Title Playwrights, with whom he workshopped the play we’ll be seeing this summer.
Join the Essential Theatre at Red Brick Brewery on February 29 to celebrate 18 years of the Essential Theatre Festival, the fifth festival of all-Georgia-written plays. Be first in line to get your Festival Passes and meet this year’s Essential Theatre Playwriting Award co-winners, Karen Wurl and Derek Dixon!
2016 Festival Announcement Event PR
This year, Essential Theatre is celebrating our Playwriting Award Winners in style on February 29 at Red Brick Brewery. Partygoers will have the chance to mix and mingle with this year’s award-winners, have fun and win prizes with Trivial Matters,
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,
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.
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.
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.
