9 DAYS LEFT to see your donation matched through our power2give campaign: https://www2.power2give.org/campaigns/210

#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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Win a walk-on role in Jordan Pulliam’s Bat-Hamlet, a comic book re-telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet!

To Enter:
Simply follow the link to our OvationTix calendarand select BAT-HAMLET WALK ON RAFFLE tickets and you will be taken to a page to sign up. Only 25 raffle tickets are available per performance date, so get yours now! Purchase of a raffle ticket does NOT reserve you a seat in the audience. If you would like to attend a performance, you will need to purchase regularly priced tickets as well.

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What if Shakespeare had conceived the melancholy Dane as a costumed crime fighter? The world of comic books and the Bard of Avon come together in this hilarious mash-up, a tale of murder and revenge,  poetry and BAM! SOCK! POW!

World Premiere cast includes:
Topher Payne as Hamlet
Lake Roberts as Horatio
Emmett Furrow as King Police Commissioner Gordrick
Aaron Gotlieb as The Puffin
Bob Smith as Jest
Kate Graham as O-Feline
Ashleigh Hoppe as Jape
Kenneth Robert Wigley as Laertes
Stuart McDaniel as The Jester
Megan Hayes as Bat-Hamlet Girl

Here’s the latest on Bat-Hamlet’s life after our 2012 World Premiere.

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Continuing our look back at the past 19 years of Essential Theatre festivals, today we take a look back at the fourteenth Essential Theatre Festival, in 2012.

Continuing our look back at 20 years of Essential Theatre Festivals …
2012 was a big, big year for us, with our highest attendance and box office records ever. Not conincidentally, it was also our first year of doing ALL new work by Georgia writers!
There was Topher Payne’s EVELYN IN PURGATORY, which is now published by Samuel French and has had at least two further productions.

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Jordan Pulliam won the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award for 2012 with the wildly popular Bat-Hamlet, which has gone on to have an impressive five more productions around the country following its premiere with Essential.  (We still occasionally get asked when we’re going to remount it, in fact – by cast and audience alike!)

Here is what Jordan had to say about his experience with us in 2012:

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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TWO DAYS LEFT to see your donation matched through our power2give campaign — donate today!https://www2.power2give.org/campaigns/210

#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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Jordan Pulliam

BAT-HAMLET was Jordan’s first full-length work, premiering with Essential in 2012 and going on to be produced three more times since then, in Charleston, Louisville and Chicago.

Now, more than two years after BAT-HAMLET’s premiere, Jordan has this to say about seeing his work come to life onstage with Essential:

“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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Topher Payne

Happy Birthday to today’s playwright, Topher Payne!
Topher has acted and written for Essential’s stage and provided behind-the-scenes help for years.

In an interview back in 2012, the year of our first All Georgia Playwrights festival which included his play EVELYN IN PURGATORY as well as BAT-HAMLET, in which he played the title role (pictured here), Topher had this to say about being a playwright in Atlanta:

“I don’t have dreams of Hollywood. I have dreams of making Atlanta the city I moved to when I left Mississippi. We’re the town that produced Alfred Uhry,

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CELEBRITY CHEF MATTHEW MYERS!

Here’s a bit of trivia for you: Did you know that more characters were killed off in STRAY DOGS than in any show Essential has ever done — except BAT-HAMLET, of course!

JOIN ACTOR, PLAYWRIGHT AND CELEBRITY CHEF MATTHEW MYERS TOMORROW NIGHT AT UNCLE MADDIO’S TOCO HILLS for fun, fellowship — and prizes! 15% of proceeds will be donated to Essential.

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