Great Pizza, Great Theatre, It’s What’s Essential. 

 
Print this coupon and take it to DaVinci’s Pizzeria and  20% of your tab will be donated to support this year’s Essential Theatre Festival. 

The term Pizzaiolo originated in Old World Italy.  In the old villages, there were many places to find pizza in the markets.  But every village had one that stood out in a unique way, and generally, the person driving that shop was referred to a Pizzaiolo.  Each Pizzaiolo was considered to be a master pie maker.
     

Continue reading →

Atlanta playwright Gabriel Jason Dean, winner of the 2010 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award for his play QUALITIES OF STARLIGHT, has won the 2011 Ken Ludwig Playwriting Scholarship, given out each year as part of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for the body of work of a student playwright. QUALITIES OF STARLIGHT was one of the plays he was honored for. The Essential Theatre congratulates Gabriel for another step in what’s sure to be a great career!

Continue reading →

“Assume nothing. Notice everything. Make something… happen.” Playwright of Night Blooms, Margaret Baldwin, shares her creative process while dealing with questions about race, identity and human rights.”

Continue reading →

April 23 (Shakespeare’s Birthday) was the submission deadline for the 2012 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award competition.  This will be the tenth year for this annual contest – the only one of its kind, exclusively dedicated to the work of Georgia playwrights.  The winning play has always received a cash prize (which started out at $300, and has now gone up to $600) and a full production as part of the Essential Theatre’s annual Festival of World Premieres and Regional Premieres, plays that have never been seen in Georgia before.  We’re proud of our long tradition of supporting, developing and producing the work of Georgia writers.

Continue reading →

When I first started reading Melanie Marnich’s A SLEEPING COUNTRY, I knew that we were looking for a comedy to help round out the 2011 Essential Theatre Play Festival – or, at least, something lighter than the two fairly heavy dramas we had already decided to do (Lee Blessing’s GREAT FALLS and Theroun D’Arcy Patterson’s A THOUSAND CIRCLETS).  Right from the start I was pleased with how funny A For the past thirteen years, we’ve been choosing plays to present in the Essential Theatre’s annual three-show Festival.  All we do are World Premieres and Regional Premieres, bringing Atlanta what’s new. 

Continue reading →

I’ve been a fan of Lee Blessing’s writing for a long time. When I saw the Essential Theatre’s production of his play, “Down the Road”, back in 1994, I told Peter Hardy (who directed it) that it was a play that disturbed women in ways they wanted to think about and disturbed men in ways they didn’t want to think about. Blessing’s plays tend to stir things up and make you think about stuff you feel, but don’t usually look at.

“Great Falls” stirs up the mysteries between love and fear, men and women,

Continue reading →

Peter Hardy, Artistic Director

When I first started reading Melanie Marnich’s A SLEEPING COUNTRY, I knew that we were looking for a comedy to help round out the 2011 Essential Theatre Play Festival – or, at least, something lighter than the two fairly heavy dramas we had already decided to do (Lee Blessing’s GREAT FALLS and Theroun D’Arcy Patterson’s A THOUSAND CIRCLETS).  Right from the start I was pleased with how funny A SLEEPING COUNTRY was, even while it dealt with some serious subject matter (a woman who may be in danger of dying from insomnia).  It had a magical,

Continue reading →

And yet another new opening for Essential Theatre playwright Lauren Gunderson: SILENT SKY at South Coast Repertory in California:

“She stared at the heavens, and what she saw there changed the course of astronomy. But when Henrietta Leavitt arrives at the Harvard Observatory in the early 1900s, she isn’t allowed to touch a telescope or even express an idea. Instead, she joins a group of women “computers,” charting the stars for an astronomer who calculates projects in “girl hours” and has no time for Henrietta’s probing theories. But as she measures the light of distant stars,

Continue reading →

Essential Theatre playwright Karla Jennings (we produced the World Premiere of her play IMAGES IN SMOKE in 2000) has a new play that will be opening up Northern Kentucky University’s Y.E.S. Festival on April 7. MONSTROUS BEAUTY is about the Teutonic drama queen and saint of Nazi kitsch, Leni Riefenstahl, one of the scariest artists of our time, who surged from dancer to Third Reich Uberfrauline to prisoner to American cultural icon. Co-starring Marlene Dietrich as the good twin, the play explores the labyrinth of personal morality and America’s disturbing embrace of an exceptionally disturbing artist.
Congratulations to Karla!

Continue reading →