Nedra Pezold Roberts is the playwright behind Wash, Dry, Fold, this week’s Bare Essentials reading, a play in which themes of loss and family secrets unfold in a laundromat run by two sisters as a bad loan threatens their livelihood.

Tell us a little about yourself.
As a native New Orleanian, I passed my childhood and early adult life falling in love with my city, a love affair that hasn’t diminished in over 40 years away from that home. A former English and drama teacher, I’m now an emerging playwright based in Atlanta. Several of my plays have won competitions over the past couple of years,

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Hillary Simpson Bolle is the author of this week’s Bare Essentials reading, The Wayfarers. The Wayfarers is a story in which reality mixes with passionate remembrances to spin a tale of seven extraordinary characters, filled with love, manipulation and an intricate web of human relationships.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I grew up in Washington DC, where I went to Georgetown Day School, and trained at The Washington School of Ballet until I was 13, before getting involved in theatre.  I finished high school at Woodward Academy in Atlanta.  I have a BFA in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University,

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8/3/2015        LILLIAN LIKES IT              Essential Theatre Play Festival

Click here to read the article on the Atlanta Theatre Buzz website!

*****  ( A+ ) 

#ATBUZZ_LIKES_IT

On-Line Relationships are easy.  All communication is controlled (flame wars aside) and there is none of that messy body-language/subtext/why-don’t-you-know-what-I’m-thinking messiness that plague relationships IRL.

There is nothing new or groundbreaking about this, especially those of us who predate the “plugged-in” generations.  But Joshua Mikel’s “Lillian Likes It” frames the theme in an entertainment so alive, so emotionally rich, so seems-so-hip-to-us-old-farts that the obvious quickly becomes sublime.

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Meet Alex Feliciano, the artist whose artwork is featured in this summer’s Eyedrum exhibit at the West End Performing Arts Center.

Alex’s works for this show are a slice of a complex and vibrant moment inside of what is often a mundane piece of reality.. Each piece is an effort to extract a cross-section from a commonplace experiences and show their wonder. His theme, “Some thing happened”, is an effort to illustrate the idea that we are all part of a bigger stories. Each piece is a slice out of these moments, moments we all share.

The Process:
In the end I made 16,

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7/25/2015        THE OLD SHIP OF ZION          Essential Theatre Play Festival

****   ( B ) 

FINDING FAMILY

It has been said that a church is not merely “brick and mortar,” but is really the faith and fellowship that dwell therein.  (Just Google “Church is Not Brick and Mortar” and count the Biblical references to the idea.)  As a crotchety old Atheist, the concept rarely (if ever) occupies my “inner monologue.”  But sometimes, a work of theatre cloaks itself in the paradigms and tropes of Biblical Axioms, and, if it “reaches out and grabs my heart,”

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-by Peter Hardy

Vynnie Meli is a local playwright and member of Working Title Playwrights.  In 2008, she won the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award for JIM CROW AND THE RHYTHM DARLINGS, about an all-female jazz band of (mostly) African-Americans touring the American south during World War Two.  One of our patrons called it “the most powerful play I’ve ever seen.”

Since then, Vynnie has worked on a number of projects including the book and lyrics for a musical called PLAGUED: A LOVE STORY that, after workshops with Working Title, was chosen for development at the New York Musical Theater Festival. 

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