Meet the Playwrights of the Contemporary American Theater Festival

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."

READ THE CATF INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINA

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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."

READ THE CATF INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES

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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.

READ THE CATF INTERVIEW WITH TOM

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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.

"I'm a private person in a public business. Writers have to be hermits. Too many writers want to talk about writing. It's the most boring topic in the world. I may talk about it with a couple of writer friends, but I really like my privacy. People like the one-liners because they believe they've heard something that sounds like insight so they walk away -- which is why I like one-liners."

READ THE CATF INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE

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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.

"Comedy is a defense mechanism. It's the way we survive. If people who are suffering just dwelt on the suffering, it would be totally exhausting and unpleasant. If you plan on living, you've got to have a sense of humor."

READ THE CATF INTERVIEW WITH CHISA

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