ICWP Events: March 2007

Celebration of Monologues by Women
Sponsored by the International Centre for Women Playwrights

Boston Playwrights' Theatre
949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
March 8, 7:30 p.m.

PROGRAM
Victoria Marsh - Master of Ceremonies.

Eliza Wyatt. Troubadour Line. Actor: Joe Benn.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro. Excerpt from Martha Mitchell. Actor: Geralyn Horton. Pianist: Joan Faber. Director: June Lewin.

Leslie Dillen. Excerpt from Action Jesus. Actor: Leslie Dillen. Director:Melissa Wentworth.

Kelly DuMar. Patchwork (from Weekend at the Dreaming Cloud). Actor:Elizabeth T. Rose. Director: Kelly DuMar.

Rae Edelson. Feeding Simon. Actor: Elissa Forsythe. Director: Ted Kazanoff.

Deborah Lake Fortson. Excerpt from Spackling . Actor: Deborah Fortson. Director: Melissa Wentworth.

Kirsten Greenidge. Excerpt from Proclivities. Actor: Eliza Fichter. Director: Victoria Marsh.

Laura Harrington. Excerpt from Home. Actor: Molly O'Neill. Director:Caitlin Johnson.

Beverly Scott Gidron. The Book Club. Actor: Nancy Carroll. Director: Daniel Gidron.

Geralyn Horton. Excerpt from Elegy. Actor: Robert Bonotto. "Aria" from Lullabye (lyrics by Horton, music by Bonotto) Singer: Joan Faber.

Ginger Lazarus. Excerpt from Lemonade. Actor: Alisha Jansky. Director: Ginger Lazarus.

Jacqui Parker. Excerpt from Feathers on my Arm. Actor:ShaudayJohnson-Jones. Director: Jacqui Parker.

Monica Raymond. Excerpt from Parable. Actor: Sophie Rich.Director: Monica Raymond.

Lois Roach. "Papa John," an excerpt from The Emancipation of Mandy and Miz Ellie. Actor: Naheem Garcia. Director: Victoria Marsh.

Joyce Van Dyke. Excerpt from Not My Real Mother. Actor: Richard McElvain. Director: Richard McElvain.

Amy Merrill. "Silver Spoon" and "In California" from from Silver Spoon, book by Amy Merrill, music and lyrics by Si Kahn. Singer: Suzanne Clark. Accompanist: Rebecca Harrold-DaSilva.

WHO'S WHO

Eliza Wyatt (Troubadour Line) is about to launch her first musical, Sleep Around Beauty, on the Net. Co-written with music partner, Paul Chi, it will be video-streamed from Oceanic Studios on April 23rd at 3 pm. Eastern Time, as part of Pete Townshend's Planettree Music Festival. Her play, Flowers of Red, set in Rafah, Gaza, was recently seen at Boston Playwrights Theatre and won her Best Playwright at Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival 2005. She has enjoyed many other awards and recognition from Susan Smith Blackburn, the O'Neill, and Mid-West Playwrights Conference and is now working as script-editor on Michele D'Acosta's docpic "Brits in the Hood". Boston Playwrights recently hosted her Story Workshop and she looks forward to doing more. She is a member of ICWP and the Dramatist Guild.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro (Martha Mitchell) is a playwright and short story writer. Her plays include Behind Enemy Lines (Pan Asian Repertory, N.Y.C.), Mishima (East West Players, L.A.), Matters of Life and Death (Theatre Redux, Cambridge), Barrancas (Magic Theatre, San Francisco), Pablo and Cleopatra (New Theatre, Boston), Going to Seed (BCA), Mexico City and Sailing Down the Amazon (Boston Women on Top Festival), Amsterdam (Boston Theatre Marathon and La MaMa E.T.C. N.Y.), It Doesn't Take a Tornado (Women on Top Festival and La MaMa), The Other Ocean (BTM), A Russian Tea Party (BTM), and Born Again Virgin (with music by Barbara Blatner) (BTM). Rosannawas also co-producer, writer, and narrator of Japanese American Women: A Sense of Place (co-produced and directed by Leita Hagemann), a documentarythat was part of the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit on Japanese American Women, 1885-1990. Sailing Down the Amazon was recently paired with Haiku by Kate Snodgrass in a JRV Production at BPT. Martha Mitchell (Edinburgh Fringe Festival, West End Theater et al), was written for Geralyn Horton.

Leslie Harrell Dillen (Action Jesus). As an actress, Leslie has appeared intheatre, television and film, in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco andBoston. As a playwright, her plays have been produced in Massachusetts, New York, California and Washington. Her play, Death Quilt, was workshopped at The Sundance Institute. Her ten-minute plays, Love is the Law, Montana Shotsand Brain Surgery, have been produced at the Boston Marathon. Leslie has also written and performed five solo shows. Her award winning solo play, Me & George, has been presented on stages throughout the U.S. and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Her solo play, Dressed Up! with Paula Plum's Wigged Out! was in ICWP 2003 Her-Rah, played to sold out audiences at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre and was featured on The Morning Show on the Hallmark Channel. Her new show Action Jesus will be presented at Boston Playwrights' Theatre May 10-27, 2007. Last year, Leslie received her Masters in Creative Writing from Boston University.

Kelly DuMar (Patchwork) is a playwright, psychodramatist, workshop facilitator and author of a non-fiction book, Before You Forget - The Wisdom of Writing Diaries for Your Children. Patchwork is an excerpt from her full-length play, Weekend at the Dreaming Cloud, a finalist in the John Gassner New Play Festival, Stony Brook University, NY, 2005, and the Boston Actors Theater, 2006. Kelly is active in Playwrights' Platform where shewon the Playwrights' Choice Award two years in a row (for Bloom and New Digs). Recent Play Credits: Hothouse, a finalist for the Arts and Letters Prizes of the Journal of Contemporary Culture, The Nantucket Short Play Competition, and the Robert Lehan One-Act Award, was produced by the Hovey Summer Arts Festival, 2005 and published by Heuer Publishing . Bloom, produced by Philipstown Depot One Act Festival and the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival 2005, was also published by Heuer publishing. What We Save, a one-act play, was produced by the Hovey Summer Arts Festival, 2006. Monologues published in Smith & Kraus Audition Anthologies include: If You Went Missing, My Buddy List, and Practicing Peace. Currently, Kelly is developing Away Message - A Play in Eleven Scenes. She lives in Sherborn, MA, and can be reached at diarydoor@aol.com.

Rae Edelson (Feeding Simon) is an arts rehabilitation administrator with a diverse background. As an undergraduate, she was a physics major at Barnard College. She has a Masters degree as a learning disabilities specialist from Southern Connecticut State College, and a Masters degree in theaterfrom Hunter College. She has been writing plays since the 70s and has had two plays produced off off Broadway and one produced in Boston. She has also served as president of Playwrights' Platform, a Boston theater organization dedicated to new work. She has had numerous staged readings. Her work appeared most recently in a festival of 10-minute plays at the New Georges Theatre in Manhattan. In 2006, Edelson received the Public Citizen of the Year Award from the National Association of Social Workers. Edelson served on the Board of Directors of a new regional art center, Arsenal Center for the Arts, in Watertown, MA from 2004-2006. She currently sits on the Arsenal Center's Visual Arts Committee, where she initiated an award-winning self taught art show representing artists with disabilities throughout Massachusetts.

Deborah Lake Fortson (Spackling) writes "I studied acting and theater at the International School of Theater in Paris with Jacques LeCoq, who inspired me with the excitement of physical and visual rhythm in the theater. The Bread and Puppet had a big impact on me, also Samuel Beckett, whose birthday I share. Kate Snodgrass and Derek Walcott at Boston University taught me to pay attention to Everything Verbal. The women's theater festivals in Boston were enormously important in giving me opportunities to experiment and develop. Thanks to Sophie Parker, Meri Jenkins, and Debra Wise." Fortson's plays have appeared in Boston, New York, England and Scotland. Baggage and Mermaids appeared at the Theater for a New City, NYC, and Baby Steps at MOBIUS, Boston; Re,Cher.Chez, and The Production Companyin New York, and the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh (1985-1988). Other produced works include Her Dream Kitchen, in which an aunt comes out of the refrigerator and the bowls sing(Women in Theatre Festival, 1989). Spackling, Ah, Houdini! and Traveling Naked were produced by the Women on Top Festival, (1997-2001). November and Dear Nel played in Boston Theatre Marathons. The Yellow Dress, a play about dating violence, is produced widely in schools. Body & Sold, produced by Tempest Productions (2004-5) won a Massachusetts Cultural Council award in 2005, and is the focus of a campaign Fortson is currently involved in - with Amy Merrill and Belina Mizrahi - to produce readings to raise awareness about the prostitution and trafficking of American children and teens.

Kirsten Greenidge (Proclivities). Recently playwright-in-residence at Woolly Mammoth as part of a NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Grant where she worked on her latest play, The Curious Walk of the Salamander, Kirsten's work includes Rust (currently at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco), Proclivities (Playscripts, Inc., spring 2007), At Sunday Dinner and The Interpretation of Being (featured in Point of Revue at Mixed Blood), Bossa Nova (read at Centenary Stage Company and Cardinal Stage), 103 Within The Veil (CompanyOne and 2005 Independent Reviewers of New England Award for Best New Play) The Gibson Girl (Moxie Theatre); Hinges Keep A City (a commissioned collaboration presented by The Huntington Theatre Company); Sans-Culottes In The Promised Land (2004 Humana Festival; published by Smith and Krauss and Dramatic Publishing Company, respectively); Fast and Loose (Humana 2004); and Familiar (winner of the Kennedy Center's Lorraine Hansberry Award). She has enjoyed development experiences at the Magic Theatre, P.73, Madison Rep, Hourglass, Playwright's Horizons, Bay Area Playwrights, Sundance/Ucross, New Dramatists, and The O'Neill. Kirsten is also working on commissions with CompanyOne, Cardinal Stage, South Coast, and the Kennedy Center/White House Historical Society. Kirsten attended Wesleyan University and The Playwright's Workshop at the University of Iowa, and is a member of New Dramatists.

Laura Harrington (Home). Ms. Harrington's award winning plays, musicals, operas, and radio plays have been produced regionally, Off-Broadway, in Canada, and in Europe. Some recent credits include: N (Bonaparte), Pilgrim Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts and the KO Festival; Fifteen Minutes at Midway, Tulane Univ; Hallowed Ground, Portland Stage Company, Martin Guerre, Hartford Stage Company (directed by Mark Lamos); The Heart of an Emperor, Dress Right, Universal Soldier, and Flag Girls, Boston Playwrights Theatre; Resurrection, (Music: Tod Machover), Houston Grand Opera 1999, Boston Lyric Opera, 2001; Joan of Arc; The Perfect 36 (Music:Mel Marvin), Tennessee Repertory Theatre; Marathon Dancing, (directed by Anne Bogart) En Garde Arts, NYC, and Munich, Germany; Lucy's Lapses (Music: Christopher Drobny) Portland Opera and Playwrights Horizons; The Song of the Silkie,(music: Elena Ruehr) Rockport Chamber Music Festival; Bables in Toyland, Houston Grand Opera; and Sleeping Beauty (Music: Roger Ames). Ms. Harrington teaches playwriting at Tufts and M.I.T. She is the winner of the 1998 and 2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council Playwriting Fellowship, and a two time winner of the Clauder Playwriting Competition. Other awards include a Boston "IRNE" Award for Best New Play, 2001, a Bunting Institute Fellowship at Harvard/ Radcliffe, a Whiting Foundation Grant-in-Aid, the Joseph Kesselring Award for Drama, a New England Emmy, and a Quebec Cinemateque Award.

Beverly Scott Gidron (The Book Club) is a freelance journalist frequently writing from Tel Aviv and a contributor to the Christian Science Monitor. She is with Ruth Housman a co-founder of The Company of Writers, an adult education center devoted entirely to writing. She's acted in film and television in New York and was a Production Assistant at WGBH-TV. She acted with Dustin Hoffman at the Theater Company of Boston. The Book Club is her second play to be read at an ICWP HER-RAH event. A new full length play Everything Will Be As It Is set in 1938 Jerusalem will be read at the Mill House, Oxford this March. She was George C. Scott's script reader (no relation).

Geralyn aka G.L. Horton (Elegy and Lullabye) is also an actor and director. Besides juicy roles in Martha Mitchell and some other plays by Rosanna Alfaro, Geralyn's acting credits include the Sugan Theatre's American premieres of Rona Munro's Bold Girls, Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan, Liz Lockhead's Perfect Days, and Robin Soams' Talking To Terrorists; her performance in Terrorists was nominated for the 2007 IRNE Award for Best Supporting Actress. She holds the title for Longest Continuous Membership in Playwrights Platform, with 20 years service on the Board, and has been part of ICWP since its founding. In 1990, Geralyn's play set in a Boston abortion clinic, Under Siege, (aka Choices) was picked for the Sundance Lab. Her 70 scripts are available on her Stagepage web site. These web published scripts have had productions in England, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Russia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and South Africa; and in many US high schools and colleges. Geralyn was a reviewer 1990-2003, and has a theatre blog. Her work is also featured in a weekly G.L.Horton's Stagepage Podcast at Podomatic.com

Ginger Lazarus (Lemonade) is the author of Matter Familias, which was produced at Boston Playwrights' Theatre and was nominated for Best New Play of 2004 by the Independent Reviewers of New England. Her new one-act, Benny and Serena's High School Graduation, was presented at the 14th Annual Last Frontier Theatre Conference Play Lab in Valdez, Alaska. Other honors include the 1999 John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award for MOCKBA: A Play About Moscow and selection as a ten-minute play finalist in the 2002 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival for Shooting Sparks. Her plays have been produced in the Boston area by Playwrights' Platform, Hovey Players,Theatre Cooperative, Centastage, and the Boston Theater Marathon, and havebeen featured nationally in Untitled Theater's 24/7 Festival (New York), Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Theater Festival, Pan Theater Ten Minute Play Festival (San Francisco), and Bloody Unicorn Theater Company's LesbianShorts (Tucson). Lemonade was most recently performed, along with another ofGinger's monologues, at the Warehouse Theatre outside London. Ginger holds a master's degree in playwriting from Boston University and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Emerson College. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and StageSource.

Jacqui Parker (Feathers on my Arm) has been writing plays and winning awards since she was a child... plays such as A Call Of Terror, What's Going On Down In The Basement?, Get Rid of The Roaches, Roll On Away From Here, Rhythm Of Luv, and others. Her play Dark As A Thousand Midnights, premiered in the African American Theatre Festival (of which she is the founder) and is nominated for an IRNE Award. Ms. Parker is an award winning actor and has performed in numerous theatres across the country. She is happy to beworking with Shauday Johnson-Jones who has appeared in innumerable productions of Our Place Theatre Project and also at Wheelock Family Theatre.

Monica Raymond (Parable) is a poet and playwright based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has taught writing at Harvard, Northeastern, CUNY, and the Boston Museum School. She received an MFA in Theater/Playwriting from Smith in 2000, and, since then, has had over forty staged readings and productions of her work. She has received recent awards from the Last Frontier Theater Conference,Boston Playwrights Platform, and the Writers Room of Boston. Her play, Hijab, was featured in "Occupied Territories: Palestinian- and Jewish-American Playwrights on the Middle East," and included in New York City's Samuel French Festival. Parable, her full-length, magic realist play about two families who both have keys to the same house and what happens when they try to live in it together, recently won a 2006 Gold Medal in theClauder Competition, and will be featured at Portland Stage's "Little Festival of the Unexpected," in May 2007. As a performer, she toured in An Olive on the Seder Plate, a performance by and for American Jews about Israel/Palestine. She's also performed her own work at Mobius, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and as part of Joe Chaikin's Disability Project at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Raymond helped organize ICWP's HER-RAH 2003 in Boston, and served on the management committee of Women Playwrights International from 2004-2006. She is happy to have Sophie Rich, a tenth grader at Winsor School, to do her monologue.

Lois Roach (The Emancipation of Mandy and Miz Ellie) is currently in production with Six Rounds, Six Lessons with Company One. She most recently directed the Boston premieres of Crowns and Living Out at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston. Lois was commissioned to write and direct a performance piece for the 25th anniversary of Casa Myrna Vazquez, a shelter for battered women. The piece was performed by film, television and Broadway star Phylicia Rashad. Roach also developed a touring company with her original play about AIDS, Living On... Currently under agreement with Baker's Plays; Living On... has been performed around the country and has been translatedinto Dutch. Some of Roach's other plays include, The Emancipation of Mandy and Miz Ellie, Benita's Choice, Mothers of Gods, Mothers of War and Let The Whistle Blow. Her shorts have been included in the Boston Women on Top Festival and the Boston Theatre Marathon. Lois is a Faculty member in the Theatre Department of Wellesley College where she has taught and directed original productions for the past 15 years. She is also the Project Manager for First Night's Neighborhood Network.

Joyce Van Dyke (Not My Real Mother) is currently working on a full-length play, The Oil Thief, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre / Sloan Project (2006). Her previous play, A Girl's War, received its worldpremiere at New Repertory Theatre in the fall of 2003 and was nominated forthe American Theatre Critics Association's Steinberg New Play Award. A Girl's War also had a 2001 workshop production at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and won the John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award (NETC 2001), Provincetown Theatre Company Playwriting Competition (2001), and was a Jane Chambers Playwriting Award Finalist (2003); it was published in the anthology Contemporary Armenian American Drama (Columbia University Press, 2004). Her short comedy, The Earring, which premiered at the Boston Theatre Marathon in 2005, will be published this spring in Laugh Lines: Short ComicPlays (Vintage Books). Joyce is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a graduate of Boston University's playwriting program.

Amy Merrill (Silver Spoon) has lived in the Boston area for most of her lifeand is the author of many plays. In 2005, her Driving on the Left Side, a play with live reggae music, had its Off-Broadway premiere in NYC. In addition, two of her short plays have been featured in the Boston Theatre Marathon. As a producer, Amy is the founder and president of Blackbird Productions, Inc., a 501(c) 3 organization dedicated to new plays and playwrights, and currently she is working on The Body and Sold Project. Amy belongs to the Dramatists Guild and serves on the Board of Directors of Stagesource. "Silver Spoon" and "In California" are from Silver Spoon, a new musical Amy is writing with composer and lyricist Si Kahn. Silver Spoon will have a reading in June 2007, presented by The Nora Theatre Company.

Victoria Marsh has had the pleasure of working closely with many of Boston'splaywrights, presenting new scripts. In January 2005 she directed the world premiere of Kirsten Greenidge's 103 Within the Veil for Company One, which went on to win an IRNE for "Best New Play Small Company." Also with Company One, Marsh directed Lost City, an original stage creation, written by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller in collaboration with the Company One ensemble. She served as Company One's Project Direct for Twilight: Los Angeles, leading a team of five directors. Marsh worked with playwright Lois Roach as director of Roach's Arts Residency at First and Second Church for the
development of her play, The Emancipation of Mandy and Miz Ellie with choreography by Yandje Dibinga. Marsh led readings of The Glider, by Kate Snodgrass for the Women on Top Theater Festival; White Ashes, by Barbara Blatner for the Playwrights Platform Festival of New Plays and Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro's Cowboy Samurai for New Theater. She recently directed the JRV production of Snodgrass' Haiku and Alfaro's Sailing Down the Amazon at the BPT.

Amy Weissenstein (Stage Manager) is currently studying stage management atBoston University. Some of her BU credits include Slavs, Small Tragedy, Crave, /4.48 Psychosis, and Shakespeare Project (asst). BU opera credits include: The Tsar Has His Photograph Taken (asst.), A Month in the Country (asst). She was also stage manager for Sailing Down the Amazon and Haiku.

Thanks to Blackbird Productions for postcards; Morrison Design (Houston, Texas) for postcard design, and Jeff Brewer.

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