Essential Theatre News

It's been a great year for this years playwriting award winner Vynnie Meli. Her musical PLAGUED, A LOVE STORY completed a successful run at the 2009 NY Musical Theatre Festival. Congratulations Vynnie.

The Essential Theatre also wants to congratulate Atlanta playwright Karla Jennings on winning the Pillars Playwriting Prize for her script THE SMILES. This award is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, Speech and Journalism at Georgia College and State University. Karla will receive an honorarium of $2,000.00 and her play will be produced at the College.

The Essential Theatre chose Karla's play IMAGES IN SMOKE for production in 2000, making it the second winner of our annual competition for Georgia playwrights (though we weren't officially calling it the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award yet). That production was named by Creative Loafing's Curt Holman as being one of the fifteen best shows of that year.

Karla went on to win the Playwrights First Award (given by New York's National Arts Club) for her play THE RUBY VECTOR We wish her all the best in her continued success.

In more good news for Essential Playwrights, Lauren Gunderson (winner of the 2001 and 2004 Essential Theatre Playwriting Awards, for PARTS THEY CALL DEEP and BACKGROUND) just had the World Premiere of her play EMILIE at the very prestigious South Coast Repertory in California. Congratulations to Lauren as well!

On Feburary 5, Essential Theatre's Artistic Director Peter Hardy took part in a panel discussion on new play development, along with celebrated national authors Thomas Gibbons and Joseph Skibell. This was for a theatre class at Emory University and was connected to Brave New Works, a new play development program that is presented by Theatre Emory every two years, bringing in playwrights from around the country.

Artistic Director Peter Hardy's play FLOOR PILLOWS was recently performed in the Nantucket Short Play Festival. Both that play and Hardy's MOON ACTION were finalists in that Festival's Short Play Competition.This past fall his play LUBRICANT was produced in New York City, while COUPLES THERAPY premiered at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival.

Essential Theatre Playwriting Award-winner Lauren Gunderson has a play running through Nov. 3 at Atlanta's Dad's Garage Theatre. "Class" is a different kind of political comedy, about high school students running for Class President at a Christian high school.

A Decatur native, Lauren won the Essential Theatre award for "Parts They Call Deep", when she was just eighteen years old. Since then she's gone on to win awards and be produced around the country. She's currently in the M.F.A. playwriting program at New York University. She says: "Essential Theatre is the future of southern writing. I speak from experience when I say that I will always credit them with my early success and confidence."

With strong reviews and great audiences, things got even better when we were awarded Theatre Emory's $2,000 Pat Miller Playmaking Award for our work to develop and produce new plays by Georgia writers! We've also received a grant from Fulton County - the first government funding we've ever applied for.

In 2007, the Essential Theatre was selected to become a client of Community Consulting Teams-Atlanta ("CCT"). CCT is an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization of Atlanta area MBAs and senior professionals whose purpose is to help nonprofit and public sector organizations in our communities address some of the strategic issues they encounter in furthering their missions. CCT is currently reviewing the Essential's strategic and marketing initiatives. The Essential awaits CCT's recommendations, which will be finalized in Summer 2007.