Friday, July 29, 2011

Len Cuthbert to have plays published

Len Cuthbert, the Canadian playwright who wrote Enigmatic Lucidity that was staged in Midway, KY as part of KPW's Midway Festival of New Plays in 2009, was staged along with two other “Bob & Angelina” plays-- at the London Fringe Festival in June 2011. The collection of three ten-minute plays has since been accepted for publishing and marketing by Big Dog Publishing in Florida. ,

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Congratulations to Lawrence DuKore!

Lawrence DuKore's 20 minute one-act play, Stained Glass, ran in repertory at the off-Broadway Metropolitan Playhouse during June 2011. STAINED GLASS is the story of a disabled African American combat veteran and his lady friend, a white artist who works in stained glass. They live on the Lower East Side and have divergent attitudes about dealing with a destructive black teenager who continuously throws rocks at the artist’s stained glass windows. The problem solver turns out to be an unlikely third party with a practical, realistic solution to the problem: inclusion rather than exclusion.

Mr. DuKore's play The Day that Brando Died was produced by Kentucky Playwrights Workshop, Inc. as part of it's 2009 Midway Festival of New Plays.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

AUGUST Meeting of KPW; Civilian TIX on Sale

The August meeting of the Kentucky Playwrights Workshop, Inc. will be held Sunday August 14, 2011 at Common Grounds Coffee House, Lexington, from 2-5 pm. Anyone interested in the development of new work for the stage is invited to attend.


Tickets for CIVILIAN, which will be presented as part of the New York International Fringe Festival 2011-- at The Bleecker Theatre 45 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012-- went on sale July 22, 2011. Get your tickets today! Don't miss this opportunity to see University of Kentucky students perform OFF BROADWAY!

Performances are: SUN, August 14 @ 7:30p; WED, August 17 @ 5:15p; SAT, August 20 @ 2:00p; TUE, August 23 @ 9:00p; SUN, August 28 @ 4:00p

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Civilian to be in NY Fringe Festival

Civilian A compelling documentary drama, Civilian, based on the riveting oral history interviews of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will premiere at the 15th New York International Fringe Festival. The play, by the noted playwright Herman Daniel Farrell III, tells the story of the tough transition from soldier to civilian.Farrell, co-writer of the Peabody Award winning HBO Film "Boycott" that featured Jeffrey Wright as Martin Luther King Jr. returns to the Fringe for the third time with this docudrama. Farrell’s play about George W. Bush, "ROME," premiered at the 2004 FringeNYC and his play "Portrait of a President" concerning Bill Clinton’s legacy won an Excellence in Playwriting Award at the 2002 FringeNYC.

In January of 2010 at the University of Kentucky, Doug Boyd, director of the Nunn Center for Oral History, working with veteran and alumnus Tyler Gayheart and Tony Dotson, director of the Veterans Resource Center, launched the oral history project "From Combat to Kentucky" in order to chronicle the stories of student veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently, Farrell, an assistant professor of theatre at the University of Kentucky, and students in his "Staging History" Theatre Department course, devised a verbatim theatre piece drawn from the oral history transcripts. The play Bringing It Home: Voices of Student Veterans premiered in April 2010 in the Armory on the University of Kentucky campus and was subsequently produced in November 2010 at Eastern Kentucky University and again at the UK Armory as part of the Veterans Day commemorations.

The play Civilian, by Farrell, incorporates additional interviews by student veterans and dares to address a current brewing problem in America. "Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed his concern that there is a growing divide between those who have served in the armed forces and the civilian populace,” notes Farrell. “This play closely examines the current fraught relationship between civilians and veterans while also conveying the heart-wrenching stories of men and women who served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, returned home and have struggled to make the transition back to civilian life.”

The cast, crew and writer/dramaturgs of Bringing it Home: Voices of Student Veterans included: Kendrel Dickerson, Joe Fields-Elswick, Michael Fischer, Tanner Gray, Callie Hanks, Andrew Hill, Kara Strait, Maggie Howell, Alex Koehl, Natalie Nicole, Max Baron Reid, Brian Sprague, Kevin Sullivan, Emmanuel Thurman and Lindsay Warnick. Fischer, one of the eight actors featured in the production, is not only a theatre major but is a veteran of the war in Iraq.

The veterans depicted in the production are UK students Ian Abney, Jonathan Herst, Stephanie Murphy, Andrew Napier and Nathan Noble.
The FringeNYC production of civilian is being produced by the UK Department of Theatre Chair, Nancy Jones, in association with the Veterans Resource Center Director, Anthony Dotson, the Nunn Center for Oral History Director, Doug Boyd, and the College of Fine Arts Dean, Michael Tick.

Tickets go on sale July 22, 2011:

New York International Fringe Festival 2011
The Bleecker Theatre
45 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012

At Lafayette Street. One block north of Houston Street and one block east of Broadway.

SUN, August 14 @ 7:30p; WED, August 17 @ 5:15p; SAT, August 20 @ 2:00p; TUE, August 23 @ 9:00p; SUN, August 28 @ 4:00p