11-12 New Works Playwrights
Nate Eppler
Larries
by
Nate Eppler
Nate Eppler is a playwright and teaching artist based in the southeastern United States. His plays include Keeping Up With the Joneses, The Shorty Hawkins Play, Modern Love and Long Way Down. Keeping Up With the Joneses, originally produced at the University of Memphis, was an official selection of the Kennedy Center/ American College Theatre Festival and was named runner-up for the 2002 American College Theater Festival National Student Playwriting Award.
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Nate was further awarded for his work on
Keeping Up With the Joneses with the Larry Riley Rising Star Award, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre New Play Award and was named to the Top Ten Artists in Memphis by Memphis Magazine and best new artist by
The Commercial Appeal. From 2002-04 Nate served as Playwright-in-Residence for Breezeway Theatre Company where he developed
The Shorty Hawkins Play and
Modern Love, which was subsequently adapted into a screenplay and produced for ArchAngel Media. Nate has participated in the Charter Theatre Company First Draft Project, the Bloomington Playwright’s Project and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. In 2005, Nate was commissioned by the Kennedy Center and the White House Historical Association to develop the play
The Amazing (Unbelievable) and (Almost) True Story of Eisenhower’s (Golfing) Squirrels for young audiences. Nate is a proud recipient of both the Tennessee Arts Commission Professional Development Support Grant and the Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2009 Nate was selected to serve as Playwright-in-Residence for the Tennessee Repertory Theatre where he continues to develop new work. As part of the Tennessee Rep Residency, Nate has developed
Long Way Down, named a semi-finalist for the 2012 Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, and
City of the Dead. For more information, please visit
www.nateeppler.com.
Michael Erickson
Honor Student
by Michael Erickson
Michael Erickson is the author of over ten full-length and one-act plays. His most recent play, Alien Hand Syndrome, is the story of an ill-fated love triangle with only two people in it. Originally produced at the MadLab Theater in Columbus, Ohio, and at the Moving Arts Theater in Los Angeles, the play was recently published in Regional Best, 2011, an anthology of new plays.
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Erickson’s work has been produced at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dance Theatre Workshop, and Via Theatre, all in New York; A Director’s Theatre in Los Angeles; the Empty Space Theatre, Pioneer Square Theatre, and the Floating Theatre in Seattle; Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; the Cleveland Public Theatre in Cleveland; the Imaginary Theatre Co. (St. Louis Repertory Theatre) in St. Louis. His collaboration with Malashock Dance & Co. toured the country and was produced on PBS as part of the Dance in America series. His work has won several awards, including a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting, California Arts Council Award, and the Mobil Playwriting Competition International Prize (Royal Exchange Theatre, England).
He is currently Playwright-in-Residence at the Tennesee Repertory Theatre in Nashville. A graduate of the MFA Theater Program at the University of California, San Diego, Erickson currently teaches playwriting and dramatic literature at Webster University in St. Louis.
Andrew Kramer
Crying for Lions
by Andrew Kramer
Andrew Kramer, is a 2010 graduate of Ball State University's Department of Theatre & Dance in Muncie, Indiana. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he moved to NYC when he was accepted into the Groundbreakers Playwrights' Group with the terraNOVA Theatre Collective to develop his play, Whales & Souls. For the past two years, he has split time between NYC and Indianapolis.
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He was a Core Apprentice Writer at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis where his play, The Dog(run) Diaries was developed, as well as a two-time semi-finalist in the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Play Festival, with his plays, A Map of Our Country (2010) and We Happy Animals (2011). Also in 2011, Andrew served as Playwright-in-Residence at the Cairns Arts Festival in Queensland, Australia, where Whales & Souls saw its world premiere. Andrew is a 2012 member of the Emerging Writer's Group at The Public Theatre in NYC, under guidance of literary manager Liz Frankel and artistic associate/playwright Jesse Cameron Alick.
Kenley Smith
Empires of the
Eternal Void
by Kenley Smith
Kenley Smith was a founding board member, board president, artistic director (and current playwright-in-residence) of Studio Roanoke, a not-for-profit Virginia theatre that specializes in the development and production of new works. His play, Devil Sedan was featured at the 2008 Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, NE, and has been produced by Baby D Productions in Omaha and by Studio Roanoke.
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Devil Sedan also won first place at the Barter Theatre’s 2008 Festival of Appalachian Plays and Playwrights and took top honors in the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Joe McCabe Memorial Playwriting Competition in 2009. Shade of the Trees a 2010 Barter finalist, went up at Studio Roanoke in August, 2009, and his Famous Bobby Pence trilogy – consisting of Devil Sedan, Twelve Stations of the Cross, and The New Testament – was produced there in 2010-11. His newest play Monkey Wrench will be produced at Studio Roanoke in April, 2012.
In addition to numerous readings, Kenley has directed two full-length plays at Studio Roanoke – his own The New Testament and Ben R. Williams’ Man With Wings.
Kenley’s fiction has won contests sponsored by Mountain State Press and the Abingdon (VA) Highlands Festival. From 1989 to 2000, he was president and chief instructor of Car Guys, Inc., a firm that teaches high-performance driving techniques.
Kenley earned an M.F.A. in Playwriting and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing, both from Hollins University. He has taught playwriting at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA, and at the Roanoke Regional Writers Conference.
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