Baltimore Playwrights Festival Announces New Play Reading Festival, 1/28

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival (www.baltplayfest.org.) announces a public play-reading marathon to take place on Saturday, 28 January at The Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theater (www.spotlighters.org), 817 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, (410) 752-1225.  Beginning at 11:00 a.m. plays to be read are The House of January by Stephen Schulze, directed by Sharon Weaver, followed at 1:00 p.m. by Foxtrot by Ronald H. McKinney S.J., directed by Bob Bartlett, and at 3:00 p.m. by Are You Kidding Me? by Chuck Durgin, directed by Stacey Bonds.  After each reading there will be a discussion of the script with the playwright, director and actors.  The event is free, and the general public is encouraged to attend.

Three living characters inhabit The House of January, by Steve Schulze, 80-year old Jack, and two of his middle-age children, Walt and Evie.  Walt is helping his father move to an apartment in a small town in New Hampshire.  They have just arrived after a 650 mile drive and a 19 hour day.  It's early December, it's snowing, and it's 11:30 PM.  Evie has been waiting anxiously for them throughout the day.  Jack is moving to be close to Evie, believing that she is a troubled person in need of his oversight and care.  His plan to save her meets catastrophe by early morning.

S. E. Schulze makes his living as an Animal Keeper at Smithsonian's National Zoo.  .Abraham & Isaac, his first full length play, was directed by Barry Feinstein for the Theatrical Mining Company and won first place both for production and script in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival's 30th season (the Carol Weinberg Award for Best Play).  

In Foxtrot, by Ron McKinney, the Corpus Christi Players of Grovertown, PA are about to premiere an original drama about Ben Jonson’s writing of “Volpone, aka The Fox”, a coded satire of Sir Robert Cecil, the probable instigator of the Gunpowder Plot and the patron of both Shakespeare and Jonson.  Foxtrot switches back and forth between the domestic squabbles of the dysfunctional Players in contemporary Grovertown and “the play within the play” mirror about Ben Jonson’s quest to prove that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic involved in the Gunpowder Plot.  How this quest gets transformed into the actual play of “Volpone” is the underlying conceit of this “historical” drama.   

Ron McKinney is a Jesuit philosophy professor at the University of Scranton and writes often on the interface between philosophy and literature/theater.  His play HAMMARSKJÖLD was produced by the BPF in 2010.

Are You Kidding Me?, by Charles Durgin, tells the story of two professors on a quest to discover a new medication while struggling to contain personal problems and professional shortcomings. They enroll the support of a sexy office manager, an uptight doctoral student, and a care-free summer intern to participate in their study, but the experiment goes haywire, dramatically altering co-worker relationships and forcing personal issues to the surface. Their efforts to help humankind (and if that fails get rich) are further complicated by the unexpected arrivals of an ex-wife, a quirky grants administrator, and an out-of-control detective. The conflicts that follow force everyone to question who they truly are and what they should really be doing with their lives. 

Charles Durgin is an alumnus of SUNY-Albany and Johns Hopkins, works at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and is an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University. He has authored books and journal articles but recently turned his attention to playwriting.  Are You Kidding Me? is his first play. Writing this play provided the opportunity to highlight the many comical and maddening dynamics that can develop in the workplace, as well as to examine the absolutely unpredictable and inspirational nature of human relationships.  

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival has presented 273 scripts by 165 playwrights, produced by 25 different companies, over the past 30 Years.  Our mission is to provide an environment that nurtures the talents of Maryland and DC playwrights through public readings, discussions, critiques and workshopping of new plays. Our summer season is devoted to the presentation of these newly developed works in cooperation with local area theaters.  Further information can be found at www.baltplayfest.org.

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