Lark Play Development Center Announces 2010-11 Playwrights Workshop Fellows

The Lark Play Development Center is proud to announce the 2010-11 Playwrights Workshop Fellows, which include Neena Beber (Jump/Cut), Carla Ching (2G Artistic Director), Greg Kotis (Urinetown), Tommy Smith (P73 Fellow, Lark PONY Fellow), and Playwright-in-Residence Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife).

Playwrights' Workshop was founded and is led by Lark Playwright Advisor Arthur Kopit, and co-hosted by writers like David Henry-Hwang and Lynn Nottage. The program brings together a community of professional playwrights to create a rigorous yet flexible environment for sharing, supporting, and discussing newly written work. Playwrights invited to this highly competitive program are nominated by the Lark's esteemed pool of Playwright Advisors, artistic directors at regional theatres, and members of the Lark's leadership team. Fellows participate in bi-weekly workshop sessions over a seven-month period and present new work developed through the workshop in public readings in the spring.

Past fellows have included: Thomas Bradshaw (The Bereaved), Sheila Callaghan (Dead City), Katori Hall (The Mountaintop), Jason Grote (1001), Lisa Kron (Well), Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)), among others.

For more information on the Lark Play Development Center, please visit www.larktheatre.org.

A laboratory for new voices and new ideas, the LARK PLAY DEVELOPMENT CENTER provides playwrights with indispensable resources to develop their work. The Lark brings together actors, directors, playwrights and the community to allow writers to learn about their own work by seeing and hearing it, and by receiving feedback from a dedicated and supportive community. The company reaches into untapped local populations and across international boundaries to seek out and embrace unheard voices and diverse perspectives, celebrating differences in language and worldviews. The Lark also plays a leading role in advancing unknown writers and their works to audiences through carefully stewarded partnerships with a host of theaters, universities, community-based organizations, and NGOs, locally, nationally and globally. The Lark is led by Producing Director, John Clinton Eisner and Managing Director, Michael Robertson.

Neena Beber - Neena's plays include Jump/Cut, The Dew Point, Hard Feelings, Thirst, A Common Vision, Tomorrowland, The Brief but Exemplary Life of the Living Goddess, and Failure to Thrive; one-acts Misreadings, A Body of Water, and Help; children's play Zachariah Mosely's Neon Blues. Theatres that have premiered her work include Theater J, Woolly Mammoth, The Magic Theatre, Thick Description, The Women's Project, The Humana Festival, Gloucester Stage, New Georges, Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, SPF. Recipient of an Obie Grant, A.S.K. Exchange to The Royal Court Theatre in London, L. Arnold Weissberger Award, grants from AT & T and the NEA, commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Otterbein College, Cleveland Playhouse (Sloan), MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Alumna of New Dramatists and HB Playwrights Unit; current member New York Playwrights Lab. B.A. Harvard University, M.F.A. N.Y.U. Tisch Dramatic Writing Program. Neena grew up in Miami, Florida.

Carla Ching - An LA transplant, Carla stumbled upon pan-Asian performance collective Peeling at the Asian American Writers Workshop and wrote and performed with them for three years, which she still considers her first theater training. Her full-length plays include TBA, Dirty, Found Objects, Big Blind/Little Blind and The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness. Short plays include Next Big Thing, The Further Adventures of Little Goth Girl, Dissipating Heat and Closing Up Shop. Her pieces have been produced or workshopped by Ma-Yi Theatre Company, The Women's Project, 2g, Desipina & Company and Vampire Cowboys among others. She's an alumna of The Women's Project Lab 2008-2010, and a current member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and the 2010 Lark Playwright's Workshop. Recipient of a 2008 Urban Artists Initiative fellowship and a 2009-2010 Teachers and Writers Collaborative Fellowship. She's received a 2010 EST/Sloan Commission from Ensemble Studio Theatre to write a play on game theory. BA, Vassar College. MFA, Actors Studio Drama School. Artistic Director of 2g.

Greg Kotis - Greg is the author of many plays and musicals including Yeast Nation (Book/Lyrics), The Truth About Santa, Pig Farm, Eat the Taste, Urinetown (Book/Lyrics, for which he won an Obie Award and two Tony® Awards), and Jobey and Katherine. His work has been produced and developed in theaters across the country and around the world, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Conservatory Theater, American Theater Company, Henry Miller's Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Stage and Film, Perseverance Theatre, Roundabout Theatre Company, Soho Rep, South Coast Rep, and The Old Globe, among others. Greg is a member of the Neo-Futurists, the Cardiff Giant Theater Company, ASCAP, and the Dramatists Guild. He grew up in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Ayun Halliday, his daughter India, and his son Milo.

Tommy Smith - Tommy's plays include The Wife (upcoming, Access Gallery; May Adrales, director), White Hot (produced at HERE Arts Center; May Adrales, director), PTSD (produced at Ensemble Studio Theatre; Billy Carden, director), The Break-Up (produced at Flea Theater; Sherri Kronfeld, director), Sextet (Washington Ensemble Theatre; Roger Benington, director), Beautiful Night (commissioned by E.S.T.; Evan Cabnet, director), Air Conditioning (Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference; Steve Cosson, director), among others. His work has also appeared at PS 122, The Ontological Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab; internationally, he has been produced in Prague, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Montreal and Athens. He is the 2010-11 PONY fellow at The Lark, a two-time winner of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, a two-time winner of the MAP Fund Award, a recipient of the E.S.T. Sloan Grant, a winner of the Page73 Productions Playwriting Fellowship and a recipient of the Creative Capital Award. Publications include White Hot in the 2008 New York Theatre Review and Streak in "Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays", printed by Vintage. He is a graduate of the playwriting program at The Juilliard School. He lives in Hell's Kitchen, New York City.

Doug Wright - In 2006, Doug received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for his book for the Broadway musical Grey Gardens. In 2004, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award, a GLAAD Media Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama League Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award for his play I Am My Own Wife. Earlier in his career, Mr. Wright won an Obie Award for outstanding achievement in playwriting and the Kesselring Award for Best New American Play for Quills. He went on to write the screenplay adaptation; the film was named Best Picture by the National Board of Review and nominated for three Academy Awards. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe Award, and received the Paul Selvin Award from the Writer's Guild of America. For director Rob Marshall, Doug penned the television special " Tony Bennett: An American Classic," which received seven Emmy Awards. For career achievement, Mr. Wright was cited with an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Tolerance Prize from the KulturForum Europa. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Writer's Guild of America, East, the Screen Actor's Guild and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Directing credits include Kiki and Herb: Pardon Our Appearance in Washington DC, Philadelphia and London. Acting credits include the films Little Manhattan and Two Lovers, and the television show "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." Recently, Doug wrote the Broadway libretto for Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid. He lives in New York with his partner, singer/songwriter David Clement.

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