New Voices @ New Rep
For our 2011-2012 Season, New Rep has invited four playwrights to join Bridget Kathleen O’Leary, New Rep’s Associate Artistic Director, to be a part of our New Voices @ New Rep Playwrighting Fellows. For 9 months, these talented, up-and-coming, and local playwrights will collaborate with directors, actors, dramaturges and designers to shape and craft their plays. On June 9 and 10, 2012, their plays will then be showcased at our first ever Festival of New Voices, a two day celebration of new work at the Arsenal Center for the Arts. Playwrights were selected through our open submission policy for local playwrights.
Meet the New Voices @ New Rep Playwrighting Fellows:
Colleen M. Hughes is a playwright born and raised in Somerville, Massachusetts. She currently lives in Brighton with her boyfriend and their three cats. She received her BA in English and Theatre from the College of the Holy Cross in 2004. After pursuing a concentration in writing poetry, Colleen wrote her first play, Mirror, Mirror, a play in verse, for her undergraduate thesis. She received her MFA in 2011 from Boston University, where her thesis play The Prayer Bargain, set in her hometown of Somerville, had a staged reading in the spring of 2010. Her ten-minute play The Mouse was produced by the Firehouse Center for the Performing Arts as part of the 2011 Boston Theatre Marathon and was also a national semifinalist for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s 2011 National Ten-Minute Play Award. In the summer of 2011, Colleen participated in Playwrights’ Commons first annual Freedom Art Retreat. Colleen is very excited to be a New Voices Playwriting Fellow @ New Rep this year. View her website.
Emily Kaye Lazzaro’s undergraduate thesis, Be The Dog, was adapted from four short stories from the collection How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers. Be The Dog was produced in 2008 by Pendragon Theatre Company in Saranac Lake, New York, and in 2009 in New York City as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Her ten-minute play Crickets was produced by the Boston Center for American Performance (BCAP) as part of the 2011 Boston Theatre Marathon and again in August of 2011 in Chicago along with another of Emily’s ten-minute plays, Saving DeShawn, or The Carrot Play, at Gorilla Tango Theatre. Emily’s MFA thesis, Grief and Surfing, kicked off the Oberon New Works series with a staged reading at Oberon in Cambridge, also in August of 2011. Emily is thrilled to be working with New Repertory Theatre as a 2011-2012 New Voices Playwriting Fellow. View her website.
James McLindon’s play, Comes a Faery, was developed at the 2010 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and is a finalist for the 2012 Humana Festival. Salvation was produced by Hudson Stage Company in New York last fall and Distant Music most recently at the Brigit Saint Brigit Theatre in Omaha last winter. Dead and Buried will be produced by the Detroit Rep next spring. His plays have been developed and/or produced at theaters such as the Abingdon, hotINK Festival, Irish Repertory, Samuel French Festival, PlayPenn, Victory Gardens, Lyric Stage, Boston Playwrights, Detroit Rep, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and Seven Devils. His plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing and Smith & Kraus. View his website.
Anna Renée Hansen is a playwright originally from California who now lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with her wife. She aims to create socially and spiritually conscious work, drawing unities where divides have been common, and telling stories too often untold. She is interested in the magic of theatre and the power of the public forum theatre provides. Anna is the artistic director and a founding member of an all-queer women's theatre ensemble. She recently completed her MFA in Playwriting at Boston University. Anna is the recipient of the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and the DeLuise Family Scholarship given by the California Alliance for Arts Education in recognition of being an “emerging artist.” She is a finalist for the 2011 Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Play Competition (of the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans). Her plays have been performed at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and at the Provincetown ArtHouse where her play Memorial was performed twice as the primary charity event during Women’s Week, making over $25,000 for Provincetown Cares, a nonprofit benefiting women with chronic health issues. Memorial was also selected to be part of the BAM! (Black Arts Movement) Festival in Austin last spring. Anna currently teaches writing at Boston University and Suffolk University, Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and she works with urban youth at Underground Railway Theatre where she teaches acting and playwriting. She is thrilled to be a part of New Rep assisting Bridget O'Leary and participating as a New Voices Playwriting Fellow. View the blog she writes for.
New Voices @ New Rep is an integral part of our mission, as it affords playwrights the opportunity to see their work read by professional actors for the first time. Staged readings are performed without any theatrical devices such as sets and costumes so that the audience and, more importantly, the playwright can focus on the script. Writers have the unique opportunity during readings to see their play performed so that they can return to it and develop it further. Each reading is followed by a talkback with the playwright where the audience offers feedback on the script, giving them a chance to help develop a new play.
We receive a few hundred new scripts each year. All readings are directed and performed by New Rep artists.
Script Submissions
New Repertory Theatre accepts unsolicited script submissions from agencies in the United States‚ Canada‚ and the UK. We do not accept unsolicited submissions from writers without an agent, but exceptions are made for writers from within the New England area. Only full scripts are accepted; no queries‚ summaries‚ or sample pages‚ please. Scripts will be returned to writers who include a self-addressed stamped envelope with their submission. Due to the large number of submissions New Repertory Theatre receives, we ask for a 12 month reading period for all scripts.
Scripts should be sent to:
New Repertory Theatre
ATTN: Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, Associate Artistic Director
200 Dexter Avenue
Watertown, MA 02472