See three new Miami plays before they reach the stage at the From Scratch – Festival of Staged Readings on August 22-23, 2015. For the past two years, three local playwrights - Chris Demos-Brown, Andie Arthur, and Juan C. Sanchez - participated in the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs’ Playwright Development Program and have worked to create a new play from scratch, under the instruction of Master Playwright, Sheri Wilner. Scripts developed through the Program have often gone onto regional theatre stages.
The Playwright Readings will be held at Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Miami, 7701 SW 76 Ave and Area Stage Company, 1560 South Dixie Highway. The readings are free and open to the public. RSVP is required asp@miamidade.gov.
Such Tremendous Faith
Saturday 8/22 @ 5PM Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Miami
Abigail Parker, daughter of the celebrated, late Rev. Nathaniel Parker, is returning to her hometown in Ohio after attempting suicide. Back at home, she finds herself attending services at her father's old Unitarian Universalist Church, where she is drawn to the new minister, Rev. Miriam. However, the congregation hasn't warmed up to Rev. Miriam in the same way Abigail has. As the congregation tears itself apart over its relationship with their minister, Abigail is forced to make a choice between an idealized past and an uncertain future. Andie Arthur's Such Tremendous Faith is a drama about issues of power and privilege in congregational life, chosen family, depression, and Christmas Eve Services that are too Jesus-y.
A playwright and theater administrator, Andie Arthur is the Executive Director of the South Florida Theatre League, is the South Florida regional representative of The Dramatists’ Guild,and is a Co-Founding Artistic Director of The Lost Girls Theatre
A Gray Divide
Sunday 8/23 @ 3PM Area Stage Company
When Jason starts a conversation with Anna Maria about the book she's reading, the classical play Medea, there's an immediate connection between them. One thing leads to another and they end up at her place, discovering each other in between bouts of heavy kissing and petting. When she suddenly remembers meeting him two years earlier at a party -- and the circumstances of that meeting -- the romance comes to an abrupt end. With elements of the Medea myth woven into the story, the play asks if we have the right to decide who we are and want to become, or whether we are only the sum of our experiences and forever tied to them.
Juan C. Sánchez’s plays have been produced in New York, Minneapolis and L.A. Most recently, he workshopped and had a reading of Jason and the Dragon at The Labyrinth Theater in NY as part of their Lab Member Summer Intensive. He would like to thank Adriana Sanchez-Perez with the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs' Playwrights Development Program (PDP), the other playwrights in the program, and Master Playwright Sheri Wilner for their guidance and support.
Wrongful Death
Sunday 8/23 @ 5:30PM Area Stage Company
When a plane crashes shortly after takeoff killing all aboard, struggling personal injury lawyer, Laura Mendes, scampers to sign up the case of her life. Wrongful Death takes a wry, satirical look at the crude ways our legal system places value on human life.
Christopher Demos-Brown is an award-winning playwright whose play, FEAR UP HARSH, received a prestigious Steinberg Award Citation from the American Theatre Critics’ Association Citation last season. He is also a two-time Carbonell and Silver Palm Award recipient. In addition to being a playwright, Chris is a practicing lawyer and a co-founder of Zoetic Stage in Miami, which will produce the world premiere of his newest play, STRIPPED, this November.
Master Playwright
Sheri Wilner's plays include Kingdom City, Father Joy, Hunger, Bake Off, Labor Day, Relative Strangers, Little Death of a Salesman, and Joan of Arkansas, and have been performed at major regional theatres, including the La Jolla Playhouse, Guthrie Theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Miami’s City Theatre, as well the Old Vic/New Voices program in London. Playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, and two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships. In addition, she is a two-time winner of the Heideman Award/National Ten-Minute Play Contest, granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville. She is currently adapting one of these prize-winning plays, Bake Off, into a full-length musical adaptation, which will premiere at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA in October 2015.
Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, and Playscripts.com has published twelve of her one-acts, which have received over two hundred productions all over the world. Also an established playwriting teacher, Sheri has been the Fred Coe Visiting Playwright in Residence at Vanderbilt University, a Douglass Wallop Fellow at Washington College, and was the head of the playwriting program at Florida State University from 2011-12.
She attended Cornell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. She lives in New York City. Playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, two Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowships and two Heideman Awards, granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville; in 1998 for Labor Day, which premiered at the 1999 Humana Festival, and in 2001 for Bake Off, which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival. Her work has been published in over a dozen anthologies including New Playwrights: The Best New Plays of 1999; The Best One-Act Plays from the Women's Project, and The Best American Short Plays 2000-2001,among others. In addition, Playscripts.com has published twelve of her one-acts, which have received over one hundred productions all over the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom and India.
The Playwright Development Program, an initiative from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with the South Florida Theatre League and The Deering Estate at Cutler, is a series of weekend workshops over the span of two years led by nationally renowned playwrights. Started in 2001, the Program provides intensive support for cultivating new work from Miami’s growing and diverse community of playwrights. It has successfully served as an incubator for new works that have been produced by major theatres nationally, including Vanessa Garcia’s The Cuban Spring at New-Theatre, David Caudle’s “Visiting Hours” at the Rising Shiners Theatre Company and Juan Sanchez’s “Buck Fever” at the Blue Heron Arts Center in New York City.
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