Honorable Mentions
- Dallas Non-Stop by BONI ALVAREZ (Bay Area/San Diego)
- Dead City by SHEILA CALLAGHAN (New York)
- Americamisfit by DAN DIETZ (Austin, Texas)
- Wreckage by CARIDAD SVICH (New York)
- God Save Gertrude by DEBORAH STEIN (New York)
- The Negligent Son by CHRISTOPHER TONG (Bay Area)
Dallas Non- Stop By Boni Alvarez
Girlie, a young Filipina has fallen head over heels for the paradise she views nightly on TV series Dallas. Her new job at the outsourced offices of American Spirit Airlines brings her one big step closer to her dream of living in America, amongst the oil barons and baronesses of Southfork.
BONI ALVAREZ, a native of East Palo Alto is currently pursuing an MFA in Dramatic Writing at the University of Southern California. His play, Looking Towards Lourdes was recently given a workshop production by the USC School of Theatre. His latest work, Sweetest Hangover will be workshopped in the fall. As an actor, he has worked with the American Repertory Theatre, National Asian American Theatre Company, Ma-Yi Theatre, PS 122, and San Jose Repertory Theatre, among others. He attended Oberlin College, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the ART/MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University.
Dead City by Sheila Callaghan
While bringing her sexy hubby his mail one morning, Samantha Blossom notices an envelope addressed to him from his lover. This spins her out into her day raw and entirely untethered – until she begins following a punk-rock genius poet girl half her age. Based on James Joyce's Ulysses.
SHEILA CALLAGHAN's plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, Annex Theatre, Moving Arts, and LABrynth, among others. Sheila is the recipient of a 2000 Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a 2001 LA Weekly Award for Best One-act, a 2001-02 Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, a 2002 Chesley Prize for Lesbian Playwriting, a 2003 Mac Dowell Residency, and a 2004 NYFA grant. She is currently working on commissions from Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, and EST/Sloan. Her full-length plays include Scab; The Hunger Waltz; Crawl Fade To White; Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake); We Are Not These Hands; Dead City; Lascivious Something; Kate Crackernuts and her opera Elemental with music by Sophocles Papavasilopoulos. Three monologues from her plays are featured in Heinemann's series, Monologues For Women, By Women. She teaches playwriting at The University of Rochester and is a proud member of the playwright's organization 13P. Please visit her at www.sheilacallaghan.com
Americamisfit by Dan Deetz
Of Mice and Men meets Natural Born Killers meets your high school American History class taught by a Jerry Lee Lewis look-alike, Americamisfit tells the story of two real-life brothers who grew up during the American Revolution, came of age, and continued the war, rampaging across the early American countryside in the name of monarchy.
DAN DIETZ is a playwright living in Austin, Texas. His plays include Tilt Angel, tempOdyssey, and Americamisfit, and have been seen in New York, Los Angeles, and points in between. Dietz has been honored with a James A. Michener Fellowship, a Josephine Bay Paul Fellowship, and the Austin Critics Table Award for Best New Play. He is a two-time finalist for the Princess Grace Award and a nominee for the Oppenheimer Award, the Osborn Award, and the ATCA/Steinberg Award. His short plays Trash Anthem and A Bone Close to My Brain were produced at the 2003 and 2004 Humana Festivals of New American Plays, respectively. Trash Anthem received the 2003 Heideman Award from the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Dietz is a Resident Company Member of Salvage Vanguard Theater.
God Save Gertrude by Deborah Stein
A punk-rock riff on Hamlet in which Queen Gertrude, living in a war-torn post-Communist country, attempts to right her wrongs. As the bombs rain down, disgraced Gertrude tells her story with songs and fury, recounting a time before she traded safety pins for diamonds and the smell of sweat for the sweet scent of Chanel.
DEBORAH STEIN’s work has been seen in New York (Dance Theatre Workshop, the Underwood Theater, the Hangar), Seattle (Seattle Rep), Philadelphia (Wilma Theatre, Painted Bride Arts Center, 1812 Productions), San Francisco (Theatre Artaud), as well as internationally in Poland, Ireland, and at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. She is an associate artist of the Pig Iron Theatre Company, with whom she has written four original collaborative works and was twice nominated for the Barrymore Award for Best New Play. Her writing has been published in Theatre Forum,Play: A Journal of Plays,The Best American Poetry of 1996, and Slavic and East European Performance Review. Deborah received her MFA in Playwriting from Brown University and is currently writing a commission for the EST/Sloan Project.
Wreckage by Caridad Svich
In a gleaming house, a marriage disintegrates as two boys play out the sexual masquerade of their remembered past. A contemporary tragedy with classical undertones about power, sex, obsession and the destruction of innocence.
CARIDAD SVICH is a playwright-songwriter-translator and editor of Cuban-Spanish-Argentine-Croatian descent. She is the recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Bunting fellowship, and a TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist Grant. Her plays have been staged across the US and abroad at diverse venues such as 7 Stages, The Women's Project, Cincinnati Playhouse, Salvage Vanguard and INTAR. Key works include Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man's Blues, Any Place But Here, Iphigenia...(a rave fable), Fugitive Pieces, Twelve Ophelias, Magnificent Waste and her multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations,which will be seen at the Edinburgh Festival this summer. She is editor of Trans-global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (from Manchester University Press), a book of conversations on media, language, culture and performance. She is co-editor of Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Smith & Kraus), Out of the Fringe (TCG), and Theatre in Crisis? (Manchester University Press). Some of her translations are collected in Federico Garcia Lorca:Impossible Theater (Smith & Kraus). She is contributing editor of TheatreForum, and is on the advisory committee of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge/UK). She holds an MFA from UCSD, and is resident playwright of New Dramatists. She has been selected for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History.
The Negligent Son by Christopher Tong
In a coma after an accident, the son descends into the world of his memory and imagination, traveling backwards through the times and the places in his life – from being a victim in an accident to being the messenger between his divorced parents, to being the baggage of two people who immigrate from China to the US in a search for better life.
CHRISTOPHER KARLIN TONG is completing the final year of his MFA in Playwriting at San Francisco State University. His first play, Hayley's Comet, won the Highsmith Playwriting Award and was a finalist at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2004. The Personal Drama of Patty Payless, which he wrote and directed, was honorably mentioned at the New Works for Young Women Festival at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. He was a member of the Writers' Pool for the Monday Night PlayGround series at the PlayGround Theatre. His recent playwriting efforts include two one-acts titled Loess' Burden and Kung-Fu MaChine.
