Portland Stage Presents LITTLE FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED, May 7-11

Portland Stage presents 30th Annual Little Festival of the Unexpected Tuesday, May 7 - Saturday, May 11. Sponsored by Coffee By Design. The festival will feature works by the 2018 Clauder Competition Winners Laura Edmondson, John Minigan, and Brendan Pelsue (see more on playwrights below). Anita Stewart, Executive and Artistic Director elaborates "Little Festival is an opportunity for our audience to engage directly with writers and directors working on new plays. I love that we can all participate together in the new play development process."

Since its debut in 1990, the Little Festival of the Unexpected (LFU) has established a tradition of nurturing artists, invigorating audiences, and exploring new voices, visions, and forms of theater. The festival furnishes a supportive environment for playwrights to develop their work, as well as a unique opportunity for audiences to catch a firsthand look at the creative process that brings scripts to the stage. LFU readings are performed by a company of professional actors, and are followed by an open discussion with the audience, director, and playwright. All three plays in LFU this spring are Clauder Competition Winners.

For over three decades, the Clauder Competition has been New England's most prestigious playwriting award. Created in 1981 by Jeb Brooks, who continues to underwrite the program, the Clauder Competition celebrates the distinctive voices of our region's playwrights and brings their work to the attention of the greater theatrical community each three-year cycle. The Grand Prize winner will go on to receive a Mainstage production in addition to a cash prize.

The Bone Girls by Laura Edmondson

Clauder Competition Gold Prize Winner. As a small New England town gets ready for their Fiftieth Annual Fifth Grade Colonial Festival the moms of the community are shaken by a surprising discovery. Their girls, on the other hand, are more interested in zombies than new discoveries or the colonial play they're supposed to put together.

Queen of Sad Mischance by John Minigan

Clauder Competition Gold Prize Winner. After being diagnosed with early onset dementia, a woman who revolutionized feminist Shakespeare scholarship hires a research assistant to get her last book out. Her assistant, a young undergrad student, has to decide whether she can get the sort of scholarship she needs out of this project, or if she'll just risk it all in this race against the clock.

Read to Me by Brendan Pelsue

Clauder Competition Grand Prize Winner. Read to Me is a poignant story about a child with a terminal illness who connects delicate moments in unusual ways. After discovering the mysterious "Postal Service," he sends messages to the world, and awaits a response. This poetic play, created through magical realism, reveals the quiet ways in which we connect. Read to Me will be mounted as Mainstage Season Production Oct 22 - Nov 10, 2019.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE MAY 7-11, 2019

Tuesday May 7th, 7:00 pm

Queen of Sad Mischance by John Minigan

Directed by Daniel Burson

Wednesday May 8th, 7:00 pm

Read to Me by Brendan Pelsue

Directed by Sally Wood

Thursday May 9th, 7:00 pm

The Bone Girls by Laura Edmondson

Directed by Todd Brian Backus

Saturday May 11th, 12:30 pm

Queen of Sad Mischance by John Minigan

Directed by Daniel Burson

Saturday May 11th, 3:30 pm

Read to Me by Brendan Pelsue

Directed by Sally Wood

Saturday May 11th, 7:30 pm

The Bone Girls by Laura Edmondson

Directed by Todd Brian Backus

THE PLAYWRIGHTS

Laura Edmondson's (The Bone Girls) plays have received finalist or semi-finalist status at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, PlayPenn, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, the Playwrights Foundation Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Kitchen Dog Theatre's New Works Festival, Playfest at the Orlando Shakespeare Festival, the Global Age Project at the Aurora Theatre, Reverie's Next Generation Playwrights Contest, and the W. Keith Hedrick Playwriting Award. She is the recipient of the Aurand Harris Memorial Award for her children's play The Tanzanite Princess. Her plays have been developed or produced at the HRC Showcase Theatre, Abingdon Theatre Company, Panndora's Box, Penn State University, Tulane University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Florida State University. She has also collaborated on the play Forged in Fire with Ugandan performer Okello Kelo Sam, which was performed at Voorhees Theatre in NYC. The play, a finalist for the Sundance Theatre Lab, integrates music, dance, and text to explore Okello's personal experiences of the civil war in northern Uganda; excerpts are published in Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters (Intellect Press). She lives in New Hampshire with her two teenage daughters and teaches in the Department of Theater at Dartmouth College.

John Minigan (Queen of Sad Mischance) is a 2019-2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in Dramatic Writing. His plays have been developed with the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, New Repertory Theater, the New American Playwrights Project, and Actors' Repertory Theatre of Vermont, and been produced throughout the US and Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Queen of Sad Mischance will be presented at the Great Plains Theatre Conference later this month, and his full-length comedy Noir Hamlet-a Boston Globe Critics' Pick and an EDGEMedia Best of Boston Theater 2018 selection-will be produced at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. His work has been included in the Best American Short Plays, Best Ten-Minute Short Plays, and New England New Plays anthologies. He is a four-time winner of the Firehouse New Works Contest, a winner of the Nantucket Short Play Contest, the Rover Dramawerks Competition, the Longwood 0-60 Contest, New York's 8-Minute Madness Festival, the Nor'Eastern Playwriting Contest, Seoul Players Contest and the KNOCK International Short Play Competition. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild. Please visit johnminigan.com

Brendan Pelsue (Read to Me) is a playwright, librettist, and translator whose work has been produced in New York and regionally. His play Wellesley Girl premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Hagoromo, a dance-opera piece for which he wrote the libretto, has appeared at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music and the Pocantico Center. Other work includes New Domestic Architecture at the Yale Carlotta Festival, Read to Me at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Lost Weekend with The Actors Theatre of Louisville Apprentice Company, Parking Lot, Riverbank: a Noh Play for Northerly Americans at the Yale School of Drama. Commissions include South Coast Repertory, American Opera Projects, Westport Country Playhouse, and The Actors Theatre of Louisville. He was a 2017 artist-in-residence at Chateau de la Napoule, France, where he produced the podcast We Are Not These People. He is currently working on an adaptation of Paul Harding's novel Tinkers, a new translation of Molière's Don Juan, and One Thousand Years of Music and Two Americans, a chamber opera, with composer Matthew Suttor. Originally from Newburyport, MA, he received his MFA from Yale School of Drama and his BA from Brown University, where he received the Weston Prize in playwriting.

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