afterlife
by Steve Yockey
directed by Kate Warner

February 8, 2010 at 7:30pm in the Charles Mosesian Theater

Under consideration for our 2010-2011 Season

Featuring:
Marianna Bassham*, Danielle
Karl Baker Olson, Young Man
Dale Place*, Postman, Blackbird

An approaching storm forces a young married couple to come home to their empty beach house and batten down the hatches.  When a giant wave comes crashing over them, they tumble into an alternate reality where both must confront the ghosts that haunt them and decide what their afterlife will be.  This poetic and beautiful rolling National New Play Network World Premiere by Steve Yockey is sure to captivate.

Steve Yockey is a roaming member of Out of Hand Theater. His projects with the company include HELP! and Cartoon. Actor's Express Theatre in Atlanta, GA presented the world premiere of Octopus in January 2008, followed in May/June by an extended run in San Francisco, co-produced by Encore Theatre Company and Magic Theatre. He is a regular fixture at Dad's Garage Theatre Company including the short play cycle Sleepy, a work commissioned to inaugurate the second stage “Top Shelf” series, and the adults-only Skin - both directed by Kate Warner. Dad’s Garage and Berkeley’s Impact Theatre will co-world premiere the new play Large Animal Games this fall. The Mark Wing-Davey commissioned play Wonder will open at NYU’s Atlas Theatre this Dec, directed by Rachel Chavkin. Octopus, Cartoon and subculture (collected short plays) are available from Samuel French. Other plays include: Bellwether, Heavier than... and Bliss. He is a Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Georgia and holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Steve recently completed a Coca-Cola Artist Residency teaching dramatic structure at Emory University in Atlanta, GA and currently lives/works in the San Francisco Bay Area as the NNPN Playwright-in-Residence at Marin Theatre Company.

Steve hopes to one day live on a high floor in a very tall building, get lost in Tokyo for a while and provide a home for two sweet-tempered giant schnauzers.

Tender
by Kelly Younger
directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary

March 1, 2010 at 7:30pm in the Black Box Theater

Featuring:
Jens Hinrichsen, Brian
Adrianne Krstansky*, Amanda
Ed Peed*, Frank

On the verge of foreclosure, a working mom realtor and her stay-at-home husband must reappraise their assets, including her aging truck driver father and his new motor home; but when they take away his keys, they learn love is not a loan that can be repaid.

Kelly Younger  is an award-winning playwright with work staged off-Broadway, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, throughout the Midwest and South, as well as in Canada, England, and Ireland.  New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre has commissioned Younger to write the stage adaptation of Peter Quinn's novel Banished Children of Eve to premiere off-Broadway this Fall. Select works include: the time-bending, romantic-comedy Rorschach that recently had a premiere reading in New York; I Think You Think I Love You (Playscripts; Smith and Kraus anthology Best Plays of 2005); Forgive me, Father (JAC publishing); Lady Gregory’s Ingredients (JAC publishing), winner of the Ireland National Lady Gregory Playwriting Award; Off Compass, winner of the 2007 John Gassner New Play Award; Once a Marine; Epiphany Cake; and Why Wyoming, Critics’ Choice for its night in the Samuel French off-off-Broadway Festival; The Can Can (Smith and Kraus anthology Best Plays of 2010).  Several monologues from Younger’s plays appear in various anthologies from Smith and Kraus as well as Playscripts, and an excerpt of Younger’s translation of Trojan Women appears in Beth Henley’s play Revelers (Dramatists Play Service).  Born and raised in Los Angeles, Younger earned an MA in Classics at Loyola University Chicago and PhD in Drama Studies from University College Dublin in Ireland. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University where he leads workshops in Playwriting and teaches courses in Dramatic Literature. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Denise²
by Lauren Gunderson
directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary

March 8, 2010 in the Charles Mosesian Theater

Featuring:
Marie Polizzano, Denise
Eric Rollins, Marcus, Dr. White
Bobbie Steinbach*, Amanda, Dr. Green, Receptionist
Robert Walsh*, Steven

Today Denise finds out she is not her father's daughter, but a genetically exact replication of his wife. When Denise runs away from Steven, the memory of his wife, also named Denise, returns to help find "their daughter". Denise² seeks to explore the human heart of a grieved scientific mind, positioning our hero between his past and future, his personal quest and his global impact, as he seeks understanding and forgiveness from without and within. Denise² is a play about love and loss, joy and sorrow, action and consequence, and the liquid link between them all.

Lauren Gunderson is a NYC (by way of Atlanta) playwright, screenwriter, and short story author. Received her MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch and is a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship working with science, art, and education. She will be the first ever Playwright in Residence at The Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics in 2010.  Her work has received national praise and awards including the Berrilla Kerr Award for American Theatre, Young Playwright’s Award, Eric Bentley New Play Award, Essential Theatre Prize, and many others. Her newest play Fire Work was featured at The O'Neill National Playwrights Conference this Summer 2009. Her science-history play Emilie: Le Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight, premiered at South Coast Rep April 2009 and will be published by Samuel French this winter. She has been produced off-Broadway (Parts They Call Deep), off-off Broadway (Sus Manos), recently had many new plays premiere regionally (including Class, The Van Gogh Café, Leap, Background, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Embody). She is currently working her second commission for South Coast Rep and her first commission (Rock Hill) for Marin Theatre Company. She has been commissioned by The Alliance Theatre’s Collision Project, Actors Express Theatre, Dad’s Garage Theatre, Theatrical Outfit, City University of New York, and Synchronicity Performance Group. Leap was published with Theatre Emory’s Playwriting Center, and her first collection of plays, Deepen The Mystery: Science and the South Onstage, is published with iUniverse.  She has developed plays with Second Stage and Primary Stages in New York, The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Kitchen Dog Theatre in Dallas, Actor Express in Atlanta, JAW/West in Portland, WORDBridge, Brave New Works at Emory, and others. She received a Sloan Science Script Award for her screenplay Grand Unification. Her astronomy short story The Ascending Life, winner the Norembega Short Fiction Award, will be published in the anthology, The Shape of Content; and her science play Background and was be published this spring in ISOTOPE: A Journal of Nature and Science Writing. Her string theory poem “Hook of a Number” was published in the anthology Riffing On Strings. She has spoken nationally and internationally on the intersection of science and theatre at conference all over the world.