Meet the Playwrights of the Contemporary American Theater Festival
By: Courtnie Mele Jun. 28, 2014
Meet the five playwrights of the Contemporary American Theater Festival! Click here for the performance shcedule and here for tickets.
CHRISTINA ANDERSON: "The Ashes Under Gait City"
"A personal story, a thought, an idea, a question - it's so important to get it out on paper; to get it out in some creative and artistic art form. It's hard to create a world from scratch and it's a lot of work to teach the audience about this world in an active way. But it's a million times more painful to keep it inside. Or to write a play that's safer or easier for an audience to grasp . . . it hurts more. I must always stay true to the things I'm curious about and the ways I want to tell the story."
CHARLES FULLER: "One Night"
"This may sound naïve, but sexual assault is simply wrong. You can't keep brushing things under the rug and believe they will suddenly disappear... I didn't start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don't want to say anything about sexual assault, that's your business, but I want to say something about it... In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade."
THOMAS GIBBONS: "Uncanny Valley"
"Whenever you write a play, you always hope it will go in directions you didn't plan or expect. I didn't realize when I started it that it was so much about parents and children. My wife and I have a son who is now in his first year of college. When I started the play, I was acutely aware that he wasn't going to be around here much longer and very much thinking about how much I was going to miss him. Those feelings worked themselves into the play . . . in some things revealed about Julian and in some things that Claire reveals about the past and her own daughter. The play really is about actual and metaphorical parenthood.
BRUCE GRAHAM: "North of the Boulevard"
"Comedy is immediate reaction. Your audience either laughs or they don't, and if they don't laugh, you're back delivering pizzas. In the 1970s I worked in a couple of clubs with a partner, and I hated doing the same jokes twice. I had to write new material every week. If the sketch didn't work during the first show, I'd be at the corner of Fourth Avenue leaning against a dumpster doing a rewrite for the second show.
CHISA HUTCHINSON: "Dead and Breathing"
"Whenever I tell people what the play is about, it always sounds so heavy and bleak. If you're living in hospice or a hospice worker, you cannot be in that space all the time. It would be exhausting. Hospice workers have to have a sense of humor otherwise they would scratch their eyes out and never come out into the light of day.
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