terraNOVA Collective is proud to work with 10 playwrights this season, presenting the world premiere of plays by Alexandra Collier and Christina Masciotti, staged readings of work by STEVE DiUBALDO and ANDREA LEPCIO in Chicago and New York, and the six new members of the GROUNDBREAKERS PLAYWRIGHTS GROUP.
terraNOVA Collective, under the direction of Producing Artistic Director Jennifer Conley Darling, continues to develop work with and nurture playwrights in its 2014-15 season. Now in its 12th season, terraNOVA Collective is delighted to work with 10 playwrights this year, presenting new work by ALEXANDRA COLLIER, STEVE DIUBALDO, ANDREA LEPCIO, and CHRISTINA MASCIOTTI, as well as developing six brand new plays with emerging and mid-career playwrights selected for the 6th annual Groundbreakers Playwrights Group. The selected playwrights are ELIZA BENT, EMILY BOHANNON, CHANEL GLOVER, GEORGETTE KELLY, DAN KITROSSER, and ENRIQUE URUETA.
Jennifer Conley Darling says, “The 10 playwrights we will work with this season embody the vision and goals under which terraNOVA thrives – – risk-taking, insightful, form-bending, disciplined, and all around brave, big-hearted, passionate creators. We’re thrilled to showcase work in all stages of development from early drafts through to production.”
Groundbreakers Playwrights Group is an 18-week playwriting intensive, through which terraNOVA Collective develops work in early stages of development. The work developed through the program is presented to industry and general audiences as part of the New Play Series in winter 2015.
Continuing terraNOVA Collective’s commitment to Groundbreakers alumni, two staged readings will be presented as part of the Groundworks: New Play Series.
• ME YOU US THEM by ANDREA LEPCIO, will be presented as a staged reading as part of Cherry Lane Theater’s TONGUES series on October 28 at 2pm. ME YOU US THEM was developed through the Groundbreakers Playwrights Group in 2011-12, and features Angelina Fiordellisi, Martina Heimann, Alain Lauture, and Brian Quijada, and is directed by Jo Cattell.
• BOOMER’S MILLENNIAL HERO STORY by STEVE DIUBALDO, will be presented as part of A Red Orchid Theatre’s Incubator Series in Chicago, IL on November 9-10. The play features original music by Rich Campbell, and is directed by Jo Cattell.
In spring 2015, terraNOVA will present two mainstage productions:
• SOCIAL SECURITY by CHRISTINA MASCIOTTI, a co-production with the Bushwick Starr, directed by Paul Lazar. terraNOVA Collective previously presented ADULT by Ms. Masciotti at Abrons Arts Center in 2013-14.
• UNDERLAND by ALEXANDRA COLLIER will receive its world premiere production at 59E59 Theaters in April 2015, with direction by Mia Rovegno. Ms. Collier is a Groundbreaker Playwrights Group alum from 2013-14.
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PLAYWRIGHT BIOGRAPHIES
ELIZA BENT is a performer / playwright / journalist. Her plays include: The Beyonce (commissioned by Austin’s Breaking String Theatre), Blue Wizard / Black Wizard (Incubator Arts Project and Other Forces 2014 festival), The Hotel Colors (Bushwick Starr), Karma Kharms (or yarns by Kharms) (Target Margin Lab at the Bushwick Starr). Her performance pieces include: Fire the Hire (New George’s Jam Festival), Toilet Time with Eliza Bent (Catch! 50, Great Plains Theatre Conference, “Little Theatre” at Dixon Place), Trumped! (Solo Nova Ones at Eleven) and Pen Pals Meet (Iranian Theatre Festival at the Brick). Bent is a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Bay Area Playwrights Finalist, a New Georges affiliated artist and a member of Project Y Writers Group. Bent is a senior editor at American Theatre magazine, a founding company member of the Obie-award winning company Half Straddle, and lives in Brooklyn. MFA in playwriting Brooklyn College.
EMILY BOHANNON is a playwright and actress originally from Sandersville, Georgia. She is a 2014 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrighting Program at the Juilliard School under the direction of Chris Durang and Marsha Norman. She received an A.B. Drama from the University of Georgia, and was a Rockwell Scholar at the Einhorn School of Performing Arts, where she studied with Tanya Barfield, Julian Sheppard, Cusi Cram, Keith Bunin, and Dael Orlandersmith among others. Her play, Water On The Moon, was selected for Playwrights Week 2011 at the Lark Play Development Center, and she received a 2010 Artists Fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) for her play, The Dog Watcher. Most recently, her play, Noel Gallagher’s Guitar, was performed in the Juilliard Playwrights Festival, directed by Sam Buntrock.
ALEXANDRA COLLIER is a writer from Australia, based in New York. Her recent work includes Take Me Home (a mobile theatre piece in an NYC taxi, Incubator Arts Project, Other Forces Festival), We Play for the Gods (created with Women’s Project, Cherry Lane), Holy Day (Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist, The Kilroys Top 46 List), Underland (Sydney Theatre Company workshop and Page to Stage workshop, Dixon Place; nominated for Weissberger Award). Her New York debut, The Will of the Cockroach was commissioned by The Production Company and directed by May Adrales as part of the Australia Project. Alexandra performed in the premiere of Still Waiting (La Mama, Melbourne), which subsequently toured to the Adelaide Fringe Festival and was awarded the RE Ross Trust Playwrights Award. Other awards/fellowships include: UCROSS Foundation Fellowship, SPACE on Ryder Farm residency, Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat, MacDowell Fellowship and the Dame Joan Sutherland Award (Australian-American Association). She is a graduate of Mac Wellman’s Brooklyn College MFA playwriting program, a Women’s Project Playwrights Lab ’10-12 alumni and a recent member of terraNOVA’s Groundbreakers Playwrights Group, 2014. www.alexandracollier.com
STEVE DiUBALDO is a New York City playwright, screenwriter, and poet. His playwriting has appeared onstage in production, workshops, and readings at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The LABryinth, terraNOVA Collective, Cherry Lane, Tisch School of the Arts, Greenwood Cemetery, Loyola Marymount University, the Lyric Theater, Pico Playhouse, The Underground Theater, and with Rising Phoenix Rep’s “Cino Nights”, among others. His film sketch “Couples Therapy” appeared on the front page of FunnyOrDie and is in distribution with Shorts International. He also writes for the Thundershorts web series, “Augie, Alone.” He is a member of the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre apprentice company, “The Middle Voice.” He was a 2014 terraNOVA Collective “Groundbreaker,” a 2014 Ars Nova Playgroup semi-finalist, and was the recipient of the “Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwright Foundation Fellowship” and the “Most Outstanding Playwright Award” at NYU, where he received his MFA in Dramatic Writing in 2013.
CHANEL GLOVER is a ‘trained’ lawyer who dabbles in playwriting, and desires most to be the first Black (Lesbian) Superwoman to rid the world of menacing stereotypes with just the stroke of her pencil. In May 2014, she completed an MFA in playwriting at Ohio University where her full-length plays How to Eat an Oreo, Black as the Dirt and They’re Not Rappers have received staged readings at Ohio University’s Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights’ Festival in April 2014, April 2013 and June 2012, respectively. She can be found everywhere, as she is a superwoman in training, remember? And raised American nomadic.
GEORGETTE KELLY is a playwright with one foot in New York and the other in Chicago. Her play Ballast is a finalist in the 2015 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, and was nominated for The Kilroys List 2014. Her play, F*ck la vie d’artiste recently received the Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Award at the 2014 ATHE Conference. Georgette’s other plays include: In the Belly of the Whale, How to Hero, I Carry Your Heart, and an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Lighthousekeeping. Her plays have been developed by The Kennedy Center, The National New Play Network, The Alliance Theatre, and The City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Georgette holds a B.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and an M.F.A in Playwriting from Hunter College, where she studied with Tina Howe, Arthur Kopit, and Mark Bly. www.GeorgetteKelly.com
DAN KITROSSER is a playwright, screenwriter and storyteller. His work has appeared at The Barrow Group Theatre, P.S. 122, Urban Stages, 45 Bleecker Theatre, The Ohio Theatre, The Brooklyn Lyceum and Bryant Park. His plays include DEAD SPECIAL CRABS (opening at The Barrow Group Theatre), A FEW THINGS BEFORE I LEAVE YOU (O’Neill Semi-Finalist), theMUMBLINGS (Published on IndieTheatreNow). His play TAR BABY, which he co-wrote with Desiree Burch, has been presented at PS 122 by terraNOVA Collective, the New Orleans Fringe and played Off-Broadway at the DR2. He is currently adapting Justin Torres’ novel WE THE ANIMALS for the screen, for which he was a 2014 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow. Dan was the founding Artistic Director of the Writopia Lab Worldwide Plays Festival and holds an MFA in playwriting from The New School for Drama, where he was the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Fellow. www.dankitroser.com
ANDREA LEPCIO is a playwright who works alone and in collaboration on plays, musicals, dance theater and films. Her current projects range from pieces she started, to pieces she was invited to join, to pieces that were mutually sparked. She works on multiple projects at once, always with a deadline she most often meets. Structurally, her plays are an unfolding of experience, thought and discovery. She purposefully leaves room for the audience’s imagination. For her, the richest writing is found in the moment, when she is fully present, thinking and feeling her way. She wants her audience to have that present moment feeling. Her primary themes are relationship and loss, responsibility and indifference, and the polar actions of life: to embrace and to reject. She is fascinated by our human capacity to love and tendency to cruelty. Wars wage in her plays on a scale from large to intimate. There are casualties. She writes to repair the world, to enlist Lincoln’s “better angels,” and exorcise our devils. She writes for her audience to have this experience with her, for us all to be less alone. Each play is a conversation. Since 2004 she has been the Dramatists Guild Fellows Program Director. She earned an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic.
CHRISTINA MASCIOTTI’s work has been presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival; Arts Emerson’s TNT Festival; LaStarria 90’s Desorientacion Series (Santiago, Chile); Theater Bonn (Germany), the VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival (Modena, Italy); and as part of PS 122’s New York Express Tour: Theater Garonne (Toulouse, France), T2G (Gennevilliers,France), Le Maillon (Strasbourg, France), and ZKM (Zagreb, Croatia). Her most recent production, Adult was presented in association with terraNOVA Collective, a TONY Critic’s Pick, and selected monologues from the play are being published in Smith and Kraus’ anthology: The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 2014, and Applause Theater and Cinema Books’ anthology: Best Contemporary Monologues for Women 18-35. Her earlier play Vision Disturbance was named one of the Best Plays of 2010 by Time Out New York, described as “brilliant…and unforgettable” by The New Yorker, and “a showcase for Ms. Masciotti’s gift for writing” by The New York Times. The scripts for both Vision Disturbance and Adult have been selected for inclusion in the permanent archives of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
ENRIQUE URUETA’S plays include The Johnson Administration, The Danger of Bleeding Brown, Learn To Be Latina, and Forever Never Comes. He’s a recipient of a Jerome Fellowship, a Walter Dakin fellowship at Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and was an NEA Fellow at The MacDowell Colony. Enrique received the New Works Fund award for Forever Never Comes from Theatre Bay Area and was a runner-up for the 2009 Yale Drama Series prize for The Danger of Bleeding Brown. Learn To Be Latina won the inaugural Great Gay Play contest sponsored by Pride Films & Plays and was named Best Ensemble Comedy of 2010 by the SF Weekly, which also named him Best Up-And-Coming Playwright of 2010. He’s currently a member of the Mission to Dit(MARS) 2014-15 Propulsion Lab and has a BA in Theater from The College of William & Mary and an MFA in playwriting from Brown.
ABOUT terraNOVA COLLECTIVE
terraNOVA Collective is devoted to nurturing distinct, innovative theatrical voices, and maintaining a global perspective in all facets of our art. We are dedicated to cultivating environments where the art of storytelling thrives and actively seek stages for our ever-expanding theatrical collective.
Now in its 12th year, terraNOVA Collective gives voice to hundreds of emerging artists annually, providing each individual the freedom to take risks and develop their work within a supportive environment. terraNOVA Collective provides a forum for bold, controversial, and challenging theatrical stories from first draft to full production. We celebrate the energetic diversity of live performance by supporting a variety of dynamic and contrasting works. We believe theatre’s highest purpose is to entertain by examining and discussing the human condition, crossing lines of race, status, gender, sexuality, and culture. We believe in the power of creating community around our art-making, and actively seek opportunities for the new theatre we cultivate.