Festival Passes are now on sale!
The performance schedule is still under development, but you can get your Festival Pass today to be sure you don’t miss out!
Festival Passes are your best deal, offering significant savings over regularly priced tickets, so get yours today!
Eight Ticket Pass: $140
Four Ticket Pass: $70
Two Ticket Pass: $35
Click here to read more, or sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of the page to receive our newsletter directly!
Lauren Gunderson, the very first winner of the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, is back en force in Atlanta tonight with a staged reading of her play The Revolutionists in Emory University’s Global Voices Spring Staged Reading Series and the first preview of Silent Sky, which officially opens on Saturday, at Theatrical Outfit.
The Revolutionists is a brutal comedic quartet about four very real women who lived boldly in France during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. A grand and dream-tweaked comedy about violence and legacy,
The wonderful words of Topher Payne are now on Amazon.com and on ListenUp. You can now take him with you wherever you go!
Have a Kindle? Topher’s got four different plays and his book Funny Story just waiting for you at Amazon.com
Enjoy audiobooks? The audio version of Funny Story is available through ListenUp and features a cast of Atlanta acotrs: Shelly McCook, Johnny Drago, Jacob York, Amanda Cucher, Jo Howarth, Nicholas Tecosky, Kristin Kalbli and Topher Payne himself!
Click here to read more, or sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of the page to receive our newsletter directly!
2015 Essential Play Festival Lineup downloadable press kit
Essential Theatre continues its tradition of premiering the best new work by Georgia playwrights for Atlanta audiences with this summer’s Essential Theatre Play Festival, taking place July 24 through August 23 at the West End Performing Arts Center, located at 945 Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard.
The West End Performing Arts Center is an intimate venue nestled in the heart of historic West End, two blocks from I-20 and an easy walk from the West End MARTA station. If you attended last summer’s festival,
by Parker Hilley
Topher Payne, onstage soon at Steppenwolf next month! Payne’s Angry Fags is presented by Pride Films and Plays as part of the Garage Rep at the renowned Steppenwolf in Chicago. Originally premiered right here in Atlanta at 7Stages Theatre in Little Five Points, Angry Fags shows what happens when “activism gets angry.” Described as an “Oscar Wilde-meets-‘Fight Club’ fever dream about how good ideas go bad,” the play is a riveting foray into American politics, bomb building, and pistachios. Opening February 20,
Since its inception in 2010,
2015 Essential Playwriting Contest Winner downloadable press kit
Essential Theatre is proud to announce the winner of the 2015 Essential Theatre Playwriting Contest: Joshua Mikel’s Lillian Likes It. The winning play will receive both a full production in the 2015 Essential Theatre Festival and a cash prize. Now in its fifteenth year, the Essential Theatre Playwriting Contest is the only contest exclusively dedicated to the work of Georgia playwrights.
Says Essential’s Artistic Director, Peter Hardy, “We liked Lillian Likes it because it’s a funny, theatrical look at the world of internet dating,
-from Artistic Director Peter Hardy
The first Essential Theatre Festival opening in January of 1999, sixteen years ago this month. Back then, we called it the Festival of New American Theatre, because the name “Essential Theatre” didn’t mean much to anyone yet, and because our mission was to bring American plays to Atlanta that hadn’t been yet been seen in this part of the country. And part of our mission was to annually produce the World Premiere of one new play by a Georgia writer.
In the first few years of the Festival, alongside work by such nationally renowned authors as Paula Vogel,
Start off your new year right, with John Lemley on City Cafe at noon today, when he features Atlanta’s own Francine Reed!
From WABE‘s website:
On Friday’s City Café with John Lemley:
More of our favorite stories of 2014, including John’s conversation with singer and Georgia Music Hall of Famer Francine Reed.
It’s beginning at noon on the Friday edition of City Café.
