6 Nights: playwrights

LISA D’AMOUR is a playwright and multidisciplinary artist who often creates site-specific work with her close collaborator, Katie Pearl. Recent projects include Nita And Zita, based on the lives of Hungarian sisters/showgirls/outsider artists Flora and Piroska Gellert (for which she received a Village Voice OBIE Award along with Pearl and Kathy Randels); an itinerant production of her solo performance installation Slabber in found spaces in New York and at Brown University; and Limo, a performance installation commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art specifically for the lobby area of their gallery at Altria. Lisa is a frequent and fervent collaborator with artists of different disciplines, including composers Sxip Shirey and Chris Sidorfsky, visual artists Charles Goldman and Krista Walsh and choreographers Morgan Thorson and Emily Johnson, among others. She has often explored her collaborative, site-based approach to theater making through workshops she presents at colleges and universities, including Ithaca College, Dartmouth University, Brown University and the University of Texas at Austin. Lisa received in M.F.A. in Playwriting at UT Austin in 1996, and received additional training at Eugenio Barba’s ISTA conference and the Portland International Performance Festival. She is a core member of the Playwrights’ Center and a member of New Dramatists.

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, and her opera Elemental with music by Sophocles Papavasilopoulos. Three monologues from her plays will be appearing in Heinemann’s upcoming series, Monologues By Women, For Women. Her play Kate Crackernuts received its New York premiere at the Flea Theatre in July 2004. Sheila is a proud member of the playwright’s organization 13P.

JASON GROTE’s work has been presented and developed at Soho Rep, The Flea, HERE’s American Living Room Festival, The Ohio, The Makor/Steinhardt Center, Chashama, The Brick, NYU, Circle X, The Bloomington Playwrights Project, The Neighborhood Playhouse, and The Present Company (NY Fringe), and published in McSweeneys.net, The Brooklyn Rail, and the anthologies The Back Stage Book of New American Short Plays 2004, Cultural Resistance: A Reader (Verso), From ACT UP to the WTO (Verso), Captured: A History of Film and Video on the Lower East Side (Seven Stories), and How to Run the World for Fun and Profit by Billionaires for Bush (Thunder’s Mouth/Avalon). Honors include runner-up for the Princess Grace Award. He is, with Sarah Benson, the co-chair of the 2004-05 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer/editor Lorraine Martindale. He is honored to be included in this project.

SUNG RNO’s plays include Cleveland Raining, Gravity Falls From Trees, Drizzle and Other Stories, New World, Principia, Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen, and wAve. His work has been produced by East West Players, Thick Description, Asian American Theater Company, North West Asian American Theater, San Diego Asian American Rep, Dance Theater Workshop, Immigrants’ Theater Project, Seoul International Theater Festival, New York Fringe Festival, and Ma-Yi Theater. Honors include a 2003-2004 NEA/TCG playwriting fellowship, 2003 Whitfield Cook Prize, New York Fringe Festival Best Overall Production Award (for Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen, directed by the author), Van Lier/New Dramatists fellowship, Van Lier/New York Theater Workshop fellowship, and first prize in the Seattle Multicultural Playwrights’ Festival. His plays and poetry are anthologized in But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise; Premonitions; Echoes Upon Echoes and The Nuyorasian Anthology. Ma-Yi Theater Company premiered wAve in spring 2004 at the Ohio Theater, with direction by Will Pomerantz. He holds a BA from Harvard, an MFA from Brown, and is a resident of New Dramatists.

CARIDAD SVICH is a playwright-songwriter-translator and editor. Her play Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) recently received its world premiere at 7 Stages in Atlanta. She has held an NEA/TCG Residency at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre, a TCG/Pew residency at INTAR Theatre, and has been a Radcliffe Institute fellow at Harvard University. Twelve Ophelias (a play with broken songs) was presented at Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York in March 2004,and her multimedia collaboration (with Nick Philippou & Todd Cerveris) The Booth Variations at 59 East 59th Street Theatre in August 2004. Her play Magnificent Waste is the recipient of the 2003 National Latino Playwriting Award. She is editor of Trans-global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (Manchester University Press/UK, 2004). She is co-editor of Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Smith & Kraus, 1999), Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre and Performance (TCG, 2000), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century (Manchester University Press, 2002). Her translations of five plays and thirteen poems by Federico Garcia Lorca are published in Impossible Theater (Smith & Kraus, 2000). She is on the advisory committee of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge,UK). She holds an MFA from UCSD, is founder of the performance collective NoPassport, and is resident playwright of New Dramatists. She has been selected for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History. Play Publications: Iphigenia…(a rave fable) and Fugitive Pieces in TheatreForum; Prodigal Kiss (a play with songs) and but there are fires are published by Smith & Kraus; The Archaeology of Dreams (Stage & Screen); Gleaning/Rebusca (Arte Publico Press); Scar (Third Woman Press); Brazo Gitano in Ollantay Theater Journal; and Any Place But Here (Playscripts Inc.; and TCG’s Plays in Process). Other credits include her play Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues at the Cincinnati Playhouse (winner of the Rosenthal New Play Prize) under Lisa Peterson’s direction, and Any Place But Here at Theater for the New City/NYC under Maria Irene Fornes’ direction. Fugitive Pieces was seen at Salvage Vanguard in Austin under Jason Neulander’s direction, Iphigenia…(a rave fable) was originally work-shopped by Actors Touring Company/UK at the Euripides’ Festival in Monodendri, Greece under Nick Philippou’s direction; Turn the Dark Up, Bow Down, This is a Hymn was seen at American Living Room Festival at Here/NYC; and Perdita Gracia, her hybrid adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, was work-shopped at Powerhouse Theater/New York Stage & Film. She has been guest artist at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, the Royal Court Theatre, and has taught playwriting at Paines Plough Theatre in London, Yale School of Drama, Ohio State University, University of Iowa, and the US-Cuba Writers’ Conference in Havana. Other awards: EST/Sloan Project commission, California Arts Council Fellowship, Thurber House fellowship, Reynolds Playwright in Residence at Denison University, and finalist for PEN USA West Award in Drama (2001) and the Prism International Residency Prize (2003). She was the 2002-2003 Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities Scholar in residence at Perishable Theatre in Providence.

KIA CORTHRON’s Light Raise the Roof premiered at New York Theatre Workshop, and Snapshot Silhouette at Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company, in 2004. Slide Glide the Slippery Slope, commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum, was produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival and subsequently by the Taper in 2003. The Venus de Milo Is Armed was commissioned and produced by Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2003. Other plays include Breath, Boom (London’s Royal Court Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre and elsewhere), Force Continuum (Atlantic Theater Company), Splash Hatch on the E Going Down (New York Stage and Film, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Yale Rep, London’s Donmar Warehouse Theatre), Seeking the Genesis (Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club), Digging Eleven (Hartford Stage Company), Life by Asphyxiation (Playwrights Horizons), Wake Up Lou Riser (Delaware Theatre Company), Come Down Burning (American Place Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre) and Cage Rhythm (Sightlines/The Point in the Bronx). Kia has just returned from Liberia as part of a travel/commissioning grant through the Guthrie Theater, and is currently writing a play under commission for Actors Theatre of Louisville. Awards include the AT&T On Stage Award, the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, the Mark Taper Forum’s Fadiman Award, National Endowment for the Arts/TCG, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, and the Callaway Award. Kia is a resident of New Dramatists.