Author Archives: Nancy dorsner

Celebrating 25 Years

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2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the Essential Theatre Play Festival, and it has been a banner year.

From the Southern-Fried Bake-Off 24 Hour Play Festival in January, to our summer playwriting classes, to the array of panels and speaking events we presented or were invited to participate in, and of course our Celebration of Georgia Playwrights in April and the Silver Anniversary Play Festival in August, 2024 has been a year to remember and a powerful testament to the legacy of creativity, strength, and talent of Georgia playwrights.

In a retrospective article in ArtsATL, Luke Evans wrote, “Founding Artistic Director Peter Hardy’s goal to support Georgia playwrights from conception to full production has resulted in some of the best works of the last quarter century.”

Atlanta Magazine says,

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The 16th Annual Essential Theatre Festival is now CLOSED!

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2014 marked the 16th year of the Essential Theatre Festival, and this was the third year in a row that we’ve featured exclusively Georgia playwrights, with great success and inspiring community and local support. Thanks for joining us if you made it out to the Festival.

Check back here or join our mailing list by submitting your email address at the bottom of this page, to stay up to date on all the latest Essential Theatre news. We’ll be sharing pictures and updates from this summer’s festival as well as news about what we’re up to next and what our artists,

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New Website! ..& Thank-you to our Supporters!

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Our new website is live, and it’s all thanks to our awesome supporters who helped us to fund it!

We hope you find the new website useful and informative. Here are some things you may want to check out:

Tremendous thanks to our New Website supporters: Jessica Fern Hunt,

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TONIGHT AT ACADEMY THEATRE: Shirlene Holmes’s Pathways, performed by Brenda Porter

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The Academy Theatre’s been up to some pretty exciting things since their move from Avondale Estates last year. With two new homes, one in Stockbridge and one in Hapeville, the iconic Atlanta theater is growing so fast it makes your head spin.

This weekend, they’re hosting a long-time Essential family member, Brenda Porter, as she performs the one-woman show, Pathways, written by Shirlene Holmes. Pathways takes audiences on a journey through the lives of some of the most engaging, dynamic and successful African American women in our history, women who have often been overlooked or marginalized by history text books.

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Nearly New Festival creator Park Krausen on showcasing work by living writers

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This weekend, “discover ‘nearly new’ work by living writers, performed by some of Atlanta’s hottest directors and actors in dialogue with amazing writers, producers and theater makers from Haiti, Quebec, Belgium, France, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago and Los Angeles! Celebrate the voices of women and youth through plays, graphic novels, and readings from and about the French-Speaking World. Shine a light on contemporary issues like bullying behavior, our obsession with Facebook, our litigious society and mothers and daughters.”
-nearlynewfestival.brownpapertickets.com

 

Meet Park Krausen,

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Essential Director Ellen McQueen Chosen for First Atlanta Artist’s Lab

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Longtime Essential Theatre director Ellen McQueen was one of the three artists chosen by the Alliance Theatre for the first Atlanta Artist’s Lab (AAL) program, through which she will be able to further develop The Projects Project, a multi-media theatre piece about the experience of people growing up in Atlanta’s housing projects. The Projects Project began as part of the 2012 Essential production of The Local, a collaborative theater project about the City of Atlanta, developed and directed by McQueen, a citywide portrait of Atlanta that Ellen conceived and directed,

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Henritze’s Play, Bitch of Balaclava, reading tonight as part of Brave New Works at Theatre Emory

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Tonight at 7pm in the Schwartz Center at Emory, former Essential Theatre collaborator Patricia Henritze’s play, The Bitch of Balaclava, is being read as part of Theater Emory’s Brave New Works series.

 

Brave New Works is a festival of new play readings and exploratory workshops presented by the Playwriting Center of Theater Emory. Playwrights, adaptors, composers, and dramaturgs come together towork on these plays in development, with a combined company of student and professional actors.
I had the opportunity to connect with Patricia earlier this week and hear about her experience with Brave New Works, learn a little about tonight’s play,

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Congratulations to Karla Jennings and Theroun D’Arcy Patterson, Winners of the 2014 Essential Theatre Playwriting Competition!

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ESSENTIAL THEATRE ANNOUNCES TWO WINNERS FOR THE 2014 PLAYWRITING CONTEST

Atlanta, January 2014 – Essential Theatre has just announced Theroun Patterson and Karla Jennings as co-winners of the 2014 Playwriting Competition.  “It’s taken us a long while to come to a decision this year,” observes Peter Hardy, Founding Artistic Director of the theatre, “because of the large number of strong submissions we received.  But we feel that both of these plays are worthy of the prizes and will be excellent contributions to our Festival this summer.” Both playwrights will receive a $600 cash prize and a full production in this summer’s Essential Theatre Festival.

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Thank you, Daniel Burnley

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile now, but every time I sit down to write, I get lost in the photos, my own memories and the Facebook posts from friends of Daniel’s. It’s been almost a month, and I still can’t believe we’ve done our last show together, that I’ve seen Daniel’s amazing talent onstage for the last time. This Thanksgiving, there’s a lot to give thanks for. And through the tears that still well up for a man that, let’s face it, I worked with once a year at most, I suppose it’s fitting that it took me till Thanksgiving week to be able to say it.

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“Connecting with Deaf Audiences” Final Report

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In 2013 for the first time, sign language interpretation was offered as part of the Essential Theatre Festival. This was a pretty big undertaking for us – there’s a lot of work and a lot of money that goes into making this happen smoothly and well – and we were very excited to be bringing this new aspect into our festival.
To help fund the project, we participated in our first ever power2give crowdfunding project. If you’re not familiar with power2give, it’s actually pretty awesome, and you can learn more about it here. We’d started out hoping to raise money,

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