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#2 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYS is STRAY DOGS by actor-turned-playwright Matthew Myers, which won the 2013 Playwriting Award and was produced in the 2013 Festival.

Myers first came to Essential as an actor in 2010, then contributed a couple of pieces to THE LOCAL in 2012, and the following year STRAY DOGS premiered as part of teh 2013 Essential Play Festival.

DID YOU KNOW? More characters were killed off in STRAY DOGS than in any show Essential has ever done – except BAT-HAMLET,

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#3 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYS is ONLY CHILDREN by Karen Wurl, which was produced in our first festival in 1999, two years before the creation of the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award.

Wurl went on to write MISS MACBETH, which won the Essential Playwriting Award in 2005 and has gone on to multiple successful productions since that time. She also wrote a very popular segment from NIGHT TRAVELS, which was produced in our 2007 Festival.

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#4 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYWRIGHTS is ALL OF OUR BARE ESSENTIALS PLAYS. Although not officially branded as “Bare Essentials” until 2013, Essential has presented public readings for more than ten years of our history. Here’s the full list. How many plays or playwrights from this list do you recognize?

Essential Artistic Director Peter Hardy, a playwright himself, shares some insight into how Essential helps playwrights make the most of these readings, and why:

“A great deal of care goes into the selection of the actors for these readings,”

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Thank you for taking our stakeholder survey! Your input is a vital part of the conversation as we are building our strategic plan for the next few years.

Please follow the links below to the survey group with which you most closely identify. If you identify with more than one of the groups, you can take more than one of the surveys. Each survey should take 5-10 minutes to complete. At the end of the survey, you’ll have the opportunity to enter your email address if you’d like to be contacted for further comment. You will have an opportunity at the end of the survey to volunteer to be contacted for follow-up questions,

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#5 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYWRIGHTS is CHARM SCHOOL by Larry Larson and Eddie Levi Lee. CHARM SCHOOL was the 2006 Essential Playwriting Award Winner and went on to win the Suzi’s Gene-Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award in 2007 and have multiple successful runs at Horizon Theatre.

Why is producing new plays by Georgia playwrights important?

“Performing before an audience can teach you things about a play. After watching the first few performances,

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#6 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYWRIGHTS is WEST OF EDEN by Letitia Sweitzer, originally produced as part of the 2008 Essential Theatre Festival.

This play grew from a one-act that won the 2005 Georgia Theatre Conference’s One-Act Competition, into the full-length work produced by Essential in 2008. In the interim, Essential hosted a couple of private readings of different versions of the play and was considering producing a public staged reading, but by the time of the second private reading,

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#7 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYWRIGHTS is IMAGES IN SMOKE by Karla Jennings, originally produced as part of the 2000 Essential Theatre Festival. Named one of the year’s best productions by Creative Loafing, IMAGES IN SMOKE was the first play by Jennings that Essential produced. It took place before the Playwriting Competition had been created, but in 2014 she did win the Playwriting Award with another play, RAVENS AND SEAGULLS, which was produced in that summer’s festival.

“Essential’s faith in playwrights strengthens their faith in themselves,”

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#8 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYWRIGHTS is THE OLD SHIP OF ZION, by Natalia Naman

We are proud to support Natalia and other playwrights across Georgia, and we hope you will consider supporting Essential so that we can continue to do so for years to come. Please consider making a donation to our power2give campaign today:
https://www2.power2give.org/campaigns/210
‪#‎power2give ‪#‎GeorgiaPlaywright ‪#‎EssentialArtist

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#9 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYWRIGHTS:
Winner of the 2012 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, BAT-HAMLET was Jordan Pulliam’s first full-length work and went on to win the Metropolitan Atlanta Theatre Awards for Best Original Work. It’s been produced at least three more times since Essential premiered it, in Charleston, Louisville and Chicago.

Says Pulliam, “Seeing my play, Bat-Hamlet, produced by the Essential Theatre was one of the greatest thrills of my life. I’d hardly imagined any theatre anywhere could take the spectacle that was parading through my head and put it onto a stage for others to see,

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#10 in our accompanying 20 DAYS OF ESSENTIAL PLAYS series is A THOUSAND CIRCLETS, by Theroun Patterson. A THOUSAND CIRCLETS won the 2011 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, marking his move from acting to playwriting despite a prolific and successful acting career. As if to prove the wisdom of the move, the play went on to a second production at Detroit Repertory within a year.

Patterson has since become one of the most in-demand playwrights in Atlanta, again winning the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award in 2014 with THAT UGANDA PLAY and enjoying readings and productions of other works all over town,

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