“Connecting with Deaf Audiences” is Essential’s initiative to reach out to deaf community members and share with them the same great theatre opportunities we’ve been sharing with the hearing members of our community for the past 25 years. This initiative consists of three main elements:

1. One performance of each of the three plays that make up our festival will have sign language interpreters provided by StageHands, the premiere sign language interpreting organization for theatre in Atlanta.
2. Following each signed performance will be a Meet the Playwright talkback which will also have an interpreter, allowing deaf audience members to not only enjoy the performance but also engage with other audience members and the artists involved in the production.

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Essential Theatre is seeking a select few interns for the fall semester. If interested, please
submit a resume and cover letter to the email indicated in the internship description below. To
learn more about Essential Theatre’s mission and work, check out our website and look for us on Facebook. Class credit is available for all internships.
 
Literary Intern
We are looking for up to two literary interns to work with our artistic director to review
submissions to the 2013 Essential Theatre Playwrighting Competition.

We receive over 50 submissions each year,

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We are looking for up to three interns to assist with grant writing and fundraising development during the fall semester. Gain valuable experience finding funding sources and creating grant applications.

Interns will join  the Fundraising Committee’s biweekly meetings and will assist with the tasks that are developed from these meetings. Tasks will primarily consist of researching fundraising opportunities, ensuring that application requirements are met before applications are submitted, identifying new non-grant-based fundraising opportunities and developing and implementing other fundraising ideas. Interns will complete three webinars through the Foundation Center during the semester as well and submit a one-page review of each that includes how the webinar relates to their work with Essential.

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We are grateful for our incredibly talented playwrights, cast, crew, designers and directors without whom this year’s festival would not have been possible. For the first time, we produced three critically acclaimed new plays by Georgia playwrights. We also wish to thank our audience for making this our best festival ever. Watch this brief video to hear what lies ahead for Essential Theatre. 

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“Essential Theatre is proud to announce our first Walk-On Role winner for Bat-Hamlet, Cedric Floyd!
 
Cedric will be appearing in the 8pm performance this Friday, July 27. Congratulations Cedric! We look forward to sharing the stage with you!

Raffle tickets, as well as tickets to our remaining performances, are available online. Raffle winners are drawn one week prior to the date of the performance in which they will appear. Time is running out, so get your tickets today!”

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Ophelia describes her last date with Hamlet from the Essential Theatre Play Festival’s world premiere of Bat-Hamlet by Jordan Pulliam.

Running in repertory July 2012 as part of the Essential Theatre’s 2012 Play Festival. Visit www.EssentialTheatre.com for more information and to buy tickets!

Kate Graham as Ophelia

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We’re proud and happy to announce that Theroun Patterson’s powerful family drama A THOUSAND CIRCLETS, winner of the 2011 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award (and successfully produced in our 2011 Festival) has been picked up for a second production — an 8-week run at the Detroit Repertory Theatre, next spring.  That makes two Essential Award winners in a row that have gone on to a second production (the first being our 2010 prize-winner, Gabriel Dean’s QUALITIES OF STARLIGHT, which was recently produced in Washington, D.C. in the Source Theater Festival).
 
On June 29, Theroun Patterson and Irepresented the Essential Theatre at the LMDA’s Writers Night,

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July/August 2012 – Simply Buckhead: Topher Payne: Actor/Playwright on a roll. Actor/playwright Topher Payne lives in Decatur, but seems to be practically everywhere. In the upcoming year he’ll premier new scripts at area playhouses from Roswell’s Georgia Ensemble Theatre to 7 Stages in Little Five Points, to the Springer Opera House in Columbus.

The Essential Theatre offers a free ticket (and a complimentary glass of wine) for the July 5 Preview performance of its World Premiere production of Topher Payne’s EVELYN IN PURGATORY, a prize-winning drama about public school teachers.  Topher’s play won the 2012 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award for best play written by a Georgia resident.  Set in the infamous “rubber room” of New York City’s public school system, the playwright describes it as being “like The Breakfast Club for teachers.”

The Preview performance will be at 8 p.m. on July 5 in the Actor’s Express space (located in the King Plow Art Center (http://www.actors-express.com/findus/index.html). 

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As many of you know, THE LOCAL is being produced as one of three world premiere Georgia plays in the Essential Theatre Play Festival, running from July 6th through August 5th at the King Plow Arts Center–tickets are on sale now at essentialtheatre.com. THE LOCAL recently ran a fundraising campaign through KickStarter.com to enable the show to be as beautiful as we were inspired to make it, and I’m happy to say that we have met our goal! So now the production is ready to fly and we want to tell you a little about it. 

THE LOCAL is a collaborative theatre project made of short pieces that is OF Atlanta,

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