This Thursday, Essential Theatre presents a very special one-night-only encore performance of Kate Crabtree’s Someone Else’s Child, which swept this year’s Atlanta Fringe Festival, winning both the Audience Choice Award and the Homegrown Award. Read on to find out more about this intrepid playwright and the play you’ve got one more chance to see this Thursday!

Kate Crabtree is a multi-award-winning playwright with a mission to make theatre more fun and more accessible. Her most recent play, Someone Else’s Child, debuted at the Chain Theatre this April at the NYC Fringe, where it received an Audience Choice Award. It then went on to the Atlanta Fringe, where it won both the Audience Choice Award and the Essential Theatre “Homegrown” Award. Her debut play, The Queen of England, first premiered at the SALTLAND International Theatre Festival, where it was one of twelve plays selected from a pool of over one hundred to be featured in the festival. It later made its European debut at the Edinburgh Fringe and its NYC debut in a production by Next Stop Creatives. It was also presented as a staged reading at the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre. She is a proud graduate of the Syracuse University Department of Drama.

ET: If you could share one thing about your show to explain why someone else should come see it, what would you say?

KC: It is a true dramedy, and you will experience all of the human emotions. Come see the show that audiences are calling “life-changing” and “magical” with “jokes that shine and heart that glows…every word has a heartbeat!”

ET: Where did you get the idea for this play? What made you want to write it?

KC: I was very interested in the emotional experiences of both being a surrogate and watching someone else be your surrogate. Surrogacy is such a unique topic with so many emotional layers, and I don’t think it’s explored very often in a lot of the art I’ve encountered. I found the journey of a surrogacy to be a great medium for exploring a lot of the themes that I wanted to tackle in the play, primarily loneliness and connection. In this story, the surrogacy shows how far one person will go in order to trade her loneliness for connection.

ET: How did you get into playwriting?

KC: When I was in college for acting, I had this idea for a play that I just felt like I had to write. I’d read a lot of plays in my theatre classes, so I decided I would try to start writing over winter break. I absolutely loved it. When I got back to school, I enrolled in all of the playwriting classes offered. After I ran out of classes to take, I went to the film department to sign up for screenwriting and then created an independent study for playwriting so that I could learn more. I just wanted to keep learning and keep creating. That’s still how I view my writing now – a creative learning process! Also, I just love to write stories that make me laugh as I’m typing.

ET: Are there any closing thoughts you’d like to share about having this play presented as part of the Essential Theatre Play Festival?

KC: I am absolutely thrilled! I remember seeing a show at 7 Stages when I was a kid, so this is very full circle for me! Very special!

Kate’s play, Someone Else’s Child, returns to the stage for one night only on Thursday, August 14, at 7:30pm at 7Stages. Get your tickets at EssentialTheatre.Tix.com!