The Farm Theater Awards Lia Romeo With 2020/21 College Collaboration Project Commission

Now in its seventh season of supporting emerging female writers The Farm Theater has awarded their 2020/21 College Collaboration Project Commission to playwright Lia Romeo (The Forest, featured on The Kilroys' List; NYIT Award nominee for Connected at 59E59). Ms. Romeo will collaborate with Centre College in Danville, KY (fall 2020) and Wells College in Aurora, NY (spring 2020). This will be Centre College's fourth time participating in The Farm Theater's College Collaboration Project.

The project will kick-off in February when the playwright will have an opportunity to converse with groups of students from each of the partner schools via video, to discuss the theme she is writing about and shape the direction of the play. The script will have a three-day workshop, cast with professional actors, in NYC in August 2020. Each of the schools will produce the play during the academic year and the playwright will rewrite during each process.

The project will culminate in a public reading in NYC in June 2021 with a cast made up of students from each school alongside professional actors. The College Collaboration Project has multiple schools commission an early career playwright to write a play that each school will independently produce throughout the academic year. The faculty, students, and playwright collaborate throughout the year in the development of the text.

The script will be a full-length play with a minimum of five characters. The majority of the characters will be under thirty years of age so that undergraduate actors can successfully play the roles. The play will reflect the students' thoughts on the theme suggested by the playwright. This will be The Farm Theater's seventh installment of the College Collaboration Project. Past seasons have featured playwrights Lindsay Joy, Micheline Auger, Morgan McGuire, Jan Rosenberg, Kimberly Belflower, and Erin Mallon.

Lia Romeo's plays include The Forest (O'Neill Playwrights' Conference; The Kilroys' List; NJ Rep), Connected (59E59; NYIT Award nominee), Green Whales (Unicorn Theatre; Weissberger Award nominee), Reality (HotCity Theatre; Steinberg Award nominee), The Lucky Ones (O'Neill finalist; Dreamcatcher Rep), Right Place, Right Time (O'Neill finalist; Renegade Theatre Experiment), Lovesick (59E59), Hungry (Unicorn Theatre), Babies (Lark Playwrights Workshop), and others. She was the 2019 winner of City Theatre's National Short Playwriting Award. She received a 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship in playwriting from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and was the National New Play Network Emerging Playwright-in-Residence at Writers Theatre of New Jersey. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Dramatists Play Service, and Smith & Kraus. She earned her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.F.A. in playwriting from Rutgers/MGSA, and she teaches in the MA program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
The Farm Theater The name is inspired by the "farm" system of baseball whose role is to provide experience and training for developing players. The Farm Theater develops early career artists that may not have the support system afforded others, through workshops, productions, and mentoring. The centerpiece of our programming is The College Collaboration Project. This program is in its seventh year and has commissioned eight female playwrights. We have worked in collaboration with seventeen colleges.

Lindsay Joy's In The Event of My Death, which was developed in the first year of the program was produced Off-Broadway by Stable Cable and had a sold out run. The 2017/18 collaboration commission, In the Cotton by Morgan McGuire was awarded the Mark David Cohen National Playwriting Award by the Kennedy Center. This year Kimberly Belflower's play John Proctor is the Villain was featured on The Kilroy's List. The College Collaboration Project has been featured in American Theater Magazine and on HowlRound. The Farm Theater has produced numerous solo shows, including Artist Director Padraic Lillis' show on suicide awareness Hope You Get To Eleven or What are we going to do about Sally? which was awarded Best Solo Show and Planet Advocate Award at the Planet Connections Theatre Festival. In 2017 The Farm Theater partnered with Planet Connections Theatre Festival to produce Alex Riad's The Floor Is Lava. The play was awarded Best New Play and Best Production of a New Play and The Farm Theater was awarded The Planet Advocate Award for raising money and awareness for Girls Who Code. The Farm Theater hosts a podcast The Bullpen Sessions which features working artists talking about how they built their careers. www.thefarmtheater.org

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