Premiere Stages at Kean University Reveals Play Festival Winners and Commission Recipients

Premiere Stages at Kean University has announced four playwrights selected for expanded development as part of the 2023 and 2024 seasons.

Premiere Stages has selected Diversion by Scott Organ as the winner of the 2023 Play Festival. The Premiere Play Festival is an annual competition for unproduced scripts that offers developmental opportunities to playwrights with strong affiliations to the metropolitan area. Four finalists were selected in 2023, including Diversion.  In this highly topical new play, Emilia is a devoted nurse in an ICU unit, highly regarded by her boss, her peers, and the new hire Mandy, who Emilia has taken under her wing.  When it’s discovered that someone is diverting (stealing) medicine on the unit, the nurses are unsettled, particularly when a consultant shows up, effectively placing them all under a microscope. When it’s finally revealed who the culprit is, the nurses must fight to save themselves and the integrity of the unit itself. Diversion will be fully produced as part of the Premiere Stages 2024 season (September 5-22) in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center. The company’s Producing Artistic Director, John J. Wooten, will direct.

Scott Organ’s plays have been commissioned by The Atlantic Theater Company and developed by theaters including The Barrow Group, The New Group, Page 73, South Coast Rep, and the Gulfshore Playhouse. His most recent play 17 Minutes was extended in its Off-Broadway run at The Barrow Group Theater and had its European premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

A second Play Festival finalist, The Fertile River by Vincent Terrell Durham, will receive a staged reading this fall at Premiere Stages, as directed by Kimille Howard, from Thursday, November 9 through Saturday, November 11 in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center. As the play begins, we find ourselves in the summer of 1958. Mrs. Sarah Woods has been visiting colored families in a small rural North Carolina community on a mission from the State. Cora Lee Burden is the latest to receive an appointment notice from Mrs. Woods. The sixty-four-year-old grandmother of a mentally challenged child has no idea what a white social worker from the government would want with her family. But being a colored woman of the south, she knows the visit is a call for caution. 

Vincent Terrell Durham is a Black, Gay, American playwright. He is a Samuel French Short Play Festival winner and an O’Neill semi-finalist. Vincent has received several commissions and has been published by Concord Theatricals and Theatrical Rights Worldwide.

For the first time in Premiere Stages history, two playwrights have been selected for the Liberty Live Commission, a biennial commissioning program for New Jersey playwrights to support the creation of new plays that specifically explore New Jersey history.  Benjamin V. Marshall is the first recipient of the 2023/2024 Commission. Mr. Marshall’s play, Still, will explore the life of Underground Railroad leader and abolitionist William Still. The play takes us to 1850s New Jersey, where Peter has arrived at an abolitionist office seeking help from its director, William, an African-American leader in the Underground Railroad.  As the two men learn more about each other's lives, they realize their vastly different pasts will lead them to a deeply connected future. Staged readings of Still, as directed by Marshall Jones III, will be held Friday, November 17 through Sunday, November 19 in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center.

Benjamin V. Marshall’s plays have been performed and developed at the HBO New Writers Workshop, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, Theatre for the New City in NYC, Luna-Stage/">Luna Stage, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, Interact Theatre in Philadelphia, The Warner’s International Playwrights, The Berrie Center, The National Playwrights Symposium at Cape May and the Kennedy Center.

The second Liberty Live commissioned playwright is Melissa Toomey, who is creating a new play, with music, about Asbury Park’s legendary The Upstage Club. In Upstage(d), it’s 2002 and 24-year-old Carrie Potter arrives at what was once her grandparents’ music club, The Upstage, in downtown Asbury Park. Carrie sets out to preserve the building, which has been abandoned for thirty-five years, in an attempt to reclaim her family’s musical history and turn it into a true rock venue, hoping to reignite Asbury's fading history as a music mecca. Tensions of the past and present–of gentrification, development, riots, class/race divides in Asbury–overlap and echo each other, as we explore and celebrate the power of underground music and its resilient supporters. The play is still in early development; a reading of Upstage(d) will be announced at a later date. 

Melissa Toomey has recently developed plays with The Actors Studio, Luna-Stage/">Luna Stage Company, The Tank, Fresh Ground Pepper, INKubator @ Art House Productions, NJ Play Lab, Theatre for the New City, and more. Her work was recently published by Smith & Kraus.

To learn more about the events above, please visit premierestagesatkean.com. Please note that readings are by invitation only. To inquire about attending either reading, visit our website.

Premiere Stages is made possible in part through funding from W. John Bauer and Nancy Boucher, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Carole Shaffer-Koros and Robert Koros and ExxonMobil Foundation, The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Foundation, The Northfield Bank Foundation, The Hyde and Watson Foundation, The Union Foundation, E.J. Grassmann Trust, The New Jersey Theatre Alliance, The Union County HEART Grant and through the generous support of individual patrons and local organizations. Discover Jersey Arts is our marketing partner. Visit JerseyArts.com for more information about other arts programming happening around the Garden State.

Premiere Stages is committed to producing topical plays and interactive programs that reflect people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, national origins, nationalities, ancestry, religious groups, gender expression or identities, sexual orientation, political beliefs, ages, abilities and disabilities.

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