Winners of Samuel French's 40th Annual Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival Announced!

Samuel French has announced the winners of the 2015 Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, the nation's leading short play competition. The six winning plays were presented in a Showcase on Sunday, August 9th at the conclusion of the week-long festival at the East 13th Street Theater (Classic Stage Company). These plays will be published, and available for licensing by Samuel French in the 40th Annual edition of its Off Off Broadway Plays collection:

THE GULF by Audrey Cefaly

EVELYN SHAFFER AND THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME by Greg Edwards & Andy Roninson

SEABIRD IS IN A HAPPY PLACE by James Gordon King

THROWS OF LOVE by Amy Staats

BLIND by Gloria Calderon Kellett

NARRATORS by Simon Henriques

"With our largest submissions pool ever, these plays are the best of the best," said OOB Festival co-Artistic Director Casey McLain. "The six winning plays offer something for every type of theatre producer: dramas, comedies, a solo play, and, for our first time ever, a musical. In this anniversary year, it's very exciting to be expanding the scope of the Festival into new territory."

The Final 30 were chosen from over 1,500 submissions (a record breaking number) from the U.S. and abroad. Each play was 10 to 30 minutes in length, and competed for the six top prizes in last week's competition. For this year's 40th anniversary Festival, Samuel French assembled a prestigious judging panel representing playwrights, artistic directors, and other theatre industry professionals, who selected the Finalists.

From the pool of Finalists, the Samuel French festival staff selected the winners. Greg Edwards, who wrote the book & lyrics for EVELYN SHAFFER AND THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME, expressed his enthusiasm for the Festival experience: "When our musical was accepted into the Festival, Andy [Roninson] and I shrieked so loudly that our neighbors suspected homicide. When we made the finals, we jumped as high as our athleticism would permit. And when we learned that we were getting published - well, we'll be skipping for weeks to come." He went on to say, "Andy and I grew up performing shows from the Samuel French catalogue, and now we're finally part of it!"

Audrey Cefaly * THE GULF

Audrey Cefaly, a writer-in-residence at Quotidian Theatre Company, is a playwright, actor, and director in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area. An Alabama native, Cefaly's writings are often drawn from the Gulf Coast region, where she spent her summers as a child. Her play, The Gulf was recently selected as a finalist for Ensemble Studio Theatre's Marathon of One-Act Plays. She is most known for her play Fin & Euba which won the Strawberry One-Act Festival and is published inBest American Short Plays (Applause Books). Its short screenplay adaptation was a finalist in, or the winner of, seven screenplay competitions, and its feature-length adaptation received the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. The commissioned prequel to Fin & Euba, Mill Town Girls, received its world premiere at Quotidian in 2007. Cefaly's short works have been produced throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is a 3-time winner of both the Maryland One-Act Festival, the Eastern States One-Act Festival, and the inaugural winner of UMBC's IN10. Her newest play, Maytag Virgin will have its world premiere as part of the Womens' Voices Theater Festival in the fall of 2015.

Greg Edwards * EVELYN SHAFFER AND THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME (Book & Lyrics)

Greg Edwards has written the script for Application Pending (Off-Broadway, Drama Desk nomination) and Craving for Travel (Off-Broadway); book and lyrics for Taking the Plunge (Samuel French OOB Festival, NYMF); and lyrics for Neurosis (Merry-Go-Round Playhouse, SALT Award for Best New Musical) as well as various songs with Marvin Hamlisch (White House Governors' Dinner, Mr. Hamlisch's holiday tour). His essays have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books ("We'll Always Have Disneyland Paris") and McSweeney's ("An Honest Letter from Your I.T. Department"), and his computer games in PC Gamer UK ("Jessica Plunkenstein and the Dusseldorf Conspiracy"). Honors and approximations thereof include: the BMI Harrington Award, a Puffin Grant, the Fred Ebb Award (two-time finalist), and a Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship (top-12 finalist). Greg graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, belongs to the BMI workshop and Dramatists Guild, and can be stalked most effectively at www.greged.com.

Simon Henriques * NARRATORS

Simon Henriques is a writer, actor, and comedian from Madison, Wisconsin. His other plays includeThe Tomato and the Onion (The Source Festival), Last Sunday and This Sunday and Next Sunday and Every Sunday (Production Workshop), and Shining Armor (Production Workshop). Along with his friend Skylar Fox, he created the theatre company Foxy Henriques, whose co-written plays include The Retardedly Boring Misadventures of Apathy Boy (Eugene O'Neill Theater Center 2015 National Playwrights Conference Finalist, The Brick), The Frito-Lay Project (Ars Nova), Thank You Sorry (Production Workshop), and This Is Everything (Production Workshop). He studied playwriting with Marcus Gardley and Erik Ehn at Brown University, where he was awarded the Thomas Carpenter Elocution Prize for being "an exceptional and multitalented writer with a singular voice."

Gloria Calderon Kellett * BLIND

Gloria Calderon Kellett is a television writer and producer known for her work on the CW seriesiZombie, Lifetime's Devious Maids, CBS's Rules of Engagement, and CBS's How I Met Your Mother during which she won an ALMA Award for Outstanding Script. She has sold pilots to Fox, ABC, CBS, and TVLand. Her plays have been staged at the Hudson Avenue Theatre, The Odyssey Theatre, The Elephant Theatre, The National Comedy Theatre, Pico Playhouse, and the Stella Adler Theatre. She was a finalist for the London Writers Award and won Sir Alan Ayckbourn's ISPC Award. Her series of monologues, Accessories is published by Small Fish Press & Cassini Press in Italy. Kellett lives in Los Angeles with her husband, cartoonist Dave Kellett and their two children. She is repped by Marc Provissiero at Odenkirk + Provissiero and United Talent Agency.

James Gordon King * SEABIRD IS IN A HAPPY PLACE

James Gordon King is a Vancouver-based writer. As well as being a regular contributor toBrokenPencil (Toronto) and PlankMagazine (Vancouver), James recently had his first set of poems published in Sterling Magazine (Toronto). James holds a BFA from Ryerson University in Theatre Performance Studies. His first full length play, The Living Situation, is making its world premiere in January 2016.

Andy Roninson * EVELYN SHAFFER AND THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME (Music)

Andy Roninson is the founder and host of Take A Ten, a monthly audio podcast of all-original ten-minute musicals. The podcast has featured Broadway actors like Laura Osnes, Rob McClure, Remy Zaken, and many more. Two episodes, "Finding the Words" and "The Answering Machine," were produced as part of the SoundBites Festival in NYC, winning several awards including Best Musical. Andy is a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop where he was awarded the Jerry Harrington Award for Creative Excellence and the Robert B. Sherman Scholarship. He wrote music and lyrics for two full-length musical comedies, Exorcism on Aisle Fiveand For The Birds, both produced at Purchase College. www.andyroninson.com.

Amy Staats * THROWS OF LOVE

Amy Staats is an actor, writer, and filmmaker. As a writer, she is a BVEW Screenplay Fellow for her feature script Mr. Rawls, and won best short script at LA Comedy Shorts Film Festival for her comedy Mary and Louise, which is currently screening in the festival circuit. Her plays includeHands (Naked Angels 1st Mondays), Move (New Voices Fellowship), The Changing of the Guard(EST Marathon, pub. Best American Short Play Anthology), Throws of Love (Core Artist Ensemble Twisted Shorts), and Cat.her.in.e (prod. MITF NYC best solo show nominee). Her short memoir prose has been published with Verbal Supply Company's Collection Volume 1, and has been read at Naked Angels Tuesdays@9, EST, Access Theater, and Verbal Supply Company at Halyard's. Amy is a 2015 artist in residence at SPACE on Ryder Farm for her new play Eddie and Dave: A Fictionalized Tale of Van Halen. www.amystaats.com.

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