Clubbed Thumb Announces $15,000 Biennial Commission Recipient

Clubbed Thumb announces its selection of Libby Emmons' Zeropia as the winner of their $15,000 Biennial Commission. 

In 2005, Clubbed Thumb inaugurated The Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission, which awards a playwright $15,000 to write a play for the company. The commission was created to encourage the writing of plays that, in addition to Clubbed Thumb’s usual parameters, consider the relationships between truth, power, history and personal responsibility. For each commission, Clubbed Thumb asks a question or poses a theme to serve as a jumping-off point for this examination. The theme for year 2009-2010 is “The Crisis of Confidence Speech.” Clubbed Thumb received over 150 applications from all over the world. The proposals were read blind by a four-person panel and Libby Emmons’ Zeropia was chosen as the winner.

At the heart of Zeropia is Marta, an urban planner who’s ready to take action, make a stand and get it done. She’s tried working the system to green the built environment, but nothing has been as effective as she’d hoped. Unwilling to settle for half-way, she feels the need for her own plot of land and a community of people to help her realize her vision of a net-zero town – a town that leaves absolutely zero carbon footprint. Marta and trusted assistant Amy set about putting their plan into action but as more people fill Zeropia, and Marta tries to take her vision to the national level, obstacles begin to mount both inside and out.

Libby Emmons is a playwright and the curator of Blue Box Productions’ long-running Sticky series, which has produced over 100 ten-minute plays in New York since 2003 at Bowery Poetry Club, Galapagos Art Space and in non-traditional Lower East Side spaces. Her short play - The Worm Turns at the Fort Peck Hotel - was published in the 2009 New York Theatre Review along with 11 other plays from the Sticky series. She has written over a dozen full-length plays, including The Little Room, short-listed for the BBC’s 2009 International Radio Play Competition. Emmons earned a BA in theater and philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University School of the Arts, where, among other honors, she received the Liberace Fellowship and Miller Scholarship.

Clubbed Thumb commissions, develops and produces funny, strange, and provocative new plays by living American writers. Since its founding in 1996, the company has earned 4 OBIES and presented plays in every form of development, including over 75 full productions. Clubbed Thumb is an incubator for artists and their work, staging plays to critical acclaim while supporting an ever-growing creative community. In 2001, Clubbed Thumb was awarded an OBIE grant, Off-Broadway’s highest honor, in recognition of their body of work. In 2007, Playscripts published Funny, Strange, Provocative, an anthology of plays produced by Clubbed Thumb. For more information on Clubbed Thumb, visit http://clubbedthumb.org/.