by Jennifer Kimball

What a summer it has been! This was our sixteenth Festival, and our third all-Georgia Festival. A revamped Festival layout featuring two world premieres and six readings. All Georgia writers, all Georgia artists. Our first year in West End, our first year in the Suzi Bass competition. Two Suzi recommendations and one nomination. New community partnerships with the West End Performing Arts Center and Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery. Continued relationships with VSA Arts of Georgia and Stagehands sign language interpreters through them, record levels of Festival sponsorships and community support. It has truly been an exciting and inspiring experience!

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2014 marked the 16th year of the Essential Theatre Festival, and this was the third year in a row that we’ve featured exclusively Georgia playwrights, with great success and inspiring community and local support. Thanks for joining us if you made it out to the Festival.

Check back here or join our mailing list by submitting your email address at the bottom of this page, to stay up to date on all the latest Essential Theatre news. We’ll be sharing pictures and updates from this summer’s festival as well as news about what we’re up to next and what our artists,

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by Parker Hilley

We at Essential Theatre would like to congratulate Ellen McQueen on her piece that recently won the first annual Atlanta Artists’ Lab put on by the Alliance Theatre! While we can all acknowledge that this sounds like a huge achievement – and this writer assures you reader that it is, in fact, a huge achievement – I think it would be easier to appreciate the magnitude of Ms. McQueen’s accomplishment if a little background was provided on her winning piece.

THE LOCAL, which was developed and directed by Ms. McQueen for the 2012 Essential Festival,

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A caustic comedy about the corporatization of religion, Christ America rounds out this summer’s Bare Essentials Reading Series this Tuesday night. Penned by Bill Gibson of Alpharetta, GA.

Tell us a little bit about the play we’ll be hearing Tuesday night.
Set in the corporate world of the near future, Christ America is about how companies profit from peoples’ fears, including their religious beliefs.

BRITT WACKENHUTT is a sales executive who, having been unemployed for 9 months, is under financial and other pressures to gain employment in an unhealthy economic climate.

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Gerry Bartholomai, of Chamblee, GA, is the author of tonight’s Bare Essentials offering, Miss Adelia’s Garden. Miss Adelia’s Garden is a poignant drama about the friendship between a young gay man and two elderly southern women.

Tell us a little bit about your play.
Miss Adelia’s Garden is the story of Adelia and Martha – two lifelong friends who live a rather secluded life in a small town in Georgia.

What inspired you to write this play?
It started with a dream I had. In it, I was back in my grandmother’s house in the mountains of Cordoba.

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If you’ve been with us for awhile, you may have read last summer’s interview with playwright Theroun Patterson when That Uganda Play was read as part of the 2013 Bare Essentials series. In which case, you are aware that the 2010 proposal of what came to be known as the “Kill the Gays” bill by David Bahati to the Ugandan Parliament was the event which inspired him to write the play.

In December of 2013 a modified version of this bill was approved by Parliament and in February of this year, as we were holding auditions and preparing to start rehearsals for this summer’s production of That Uganda Play,

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Brian Forrester is a resident of Roswell, GA and is author of one of next week’s Bare Essentials plays, The Beast of Skitter Creek, a dark supernatural tale about the monster lurking within us.

What inspired you to write this play?
When I was in graduate school I got into a debate with a classmate who insisted that scary stories belong almost exclusively to prose or film/tv. I was convinced that I could tell a fun horror story on a live stage and took up the challenge. Later that winter, I was driving very late at night down a twisting mountain road through a snowstorm in West Virginia when a creepy-looking wooden sign emerged on the edge of my headlight beam.

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