by Jennifer Kimball
2015 Festival Highlights.pdf 

Our seventeenth Festival, the fourth all-Georgia Festival, our second year partnering with the West End Performing Arts Center and with Eyedrum Art & Music to showcase a local visual artist and further support Georgia artists of all kinds.

Two great and well-received world premieres by two talented and gracious Georgia Playwrights,

Our best-attended Bare Essentials Play Reading Series ever — despite a power outage during one reading as the result of an afternoon thunderstorm.

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This weekend, the world lost a wonderful woman, Sharan Cage Allen Mansfield.

We were so fortunate she graced our stage this summer in THE OLD SHIP OF ZION, directed by Peter Hardy:

This past summer Essential Theatre did a new play called THE OLD SHIP OF ZION, and we needed somebody very special to play the role of Mama Gwen, the wise and beloved elder of her church. We were lucky to find Sharan Cage Allen Mansfield, who played the role beautifully and was loved by everyone in the company and (I dare say) our audiences.

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As the dust settles from this summer’s festival and we’re looking ahead to our next Bare Essentials reading, I got to spend some time with Amber Bradshaw. Amber is directing the next Bare Essentials reading on September 30, but she has been a backbone of Essential’s play development work for years. Read on to hear her thoughts on developing new plays, working with Essential and The End of William Henry, our next Bare Essentials reading this coming Thursday night.

Tell us a little about yourself as an artist. What kinds of projects do you most enjoy working on?

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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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Diane Dexter of Decatur, GA is the author of this week’s Bare Essentials reading, Deli. Deli is about a family that is trying to hang on to its business in the face of change. They are fighting declines in the neighborhood and fighting each other.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your inspiration for writing this play.
I’m a professional journalist, and I live in Decatur with my husband, Jim, (who portrays Judge in the play) and our dog Emma. I grew up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I saw a lot of thriving little towns go under,

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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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New this year, the Essential Marketplace is a vendor space at the theatre where patrons can view, enjoy and even purchase art created by Essential company members and friends past and present. Proceeds will go directly to the artists themselves, and wares can be anything from greeting cards to paintings to wood and metal works to jewelry, clothing and more.

We got the idea for the Marketplace over a period of time, starting when Be the Change People, Inc approached us before our 2014 Festival and asked if they could sell their wares before performances of That Uganda Play.

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