Very happy to be included in this year’s digital version of In Their Own Voices, an event at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre where they showcase local talent by having playwrights read an excerpt from their own plays!
Here is me reading a bit of Act I of my play EVERYBODY’S DEAD: A COMEDY, with an introduction by Pittsburgh’s Co-Dramatists Guild Rep Mora Harris. EVERYBODY’S DEAD is part of the Bunker Cycle!
In lieu of an in-person showcase this year, CMU is hosting an online version of the event. Covid makes it impossible to travel to LA but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk, drink, and Zoom together!
Delighted to be featured on this very fancy showcase website alongside my other graduating students! (and hopeful that we can all meet up in-person soon).
Very happy to share that my screenplay RECTIFIED: AN APOCRYPHAL HISTORY OF BOURBON is a finalist for the SLOAN/CMU screenwriting competition! I will be doing a speedy rewrite and the revised version will be in consideration for the competition.
Was delighted to attend the Mid-America Theater Conference to develop my short play HOW TO BE A PERSON with dramaturg Matt Fotis and director Tyrrell Woolbert, starring Andre Garner and Julia Moriarty.
I learned a ton about the play and next steps for its development, and had a blast visiting my old stomping ground of Chicago!
Had the most glorious and productive weekend in Louisville workshopping my play EVERYBODY’S DEAD: A COMEDY at Actors Theatre. Directed by the brilliant Nora Gair, with dramaturgy & curation/casting by the divine Joshua Brown, I learned a ton about the play, added several scenes, and can’t wait for my next opportunity to share it!
Performers Gabriela Llarena, Germainne Lebron, and Kat Pena were delightful to work with and embodied the characters super quickly.
I was so delighted to get a GUSH grant from CMU to help support my travel to Kentucky to research the historic bourbon industry for my upcoming alt-history science screenplay!
The screenplay is still in the research/development process but I know that I want it to be set in the early days of American Whiskey production around the 1830s, which is a time before a lot of the industry was documenting everything they were doing for posterity. To try to get a sense of Kentucky around that time, I visited 10+ distilleries (I seriously lost count) as well as a barrel-manufacturer, a historic house, the whiskey museum, and spent a night in the historic Shaker village!
There are shows tonight and tomorrow night at City’s Hamburg Studio Theatre!
In honor of my witchy show, here are some of my all-time favorite witches:
Hope to see you there!
Very excited to share that my graduate thesis play, How to Live Forever, will have a workshop production at City Theatre’s Hamburg Studio Theatre next week! The play is directed by the fantastic senior CMU director Nora Gair.
The event is free and open to the public, and tickets are first-come first-serve on the day of the performance. See the show:
Saturday, Nov. 16 – 4:00 PM
Monday, Nov. 18 – 630 PM
Tuesday, Nov. 19 – 9:00 PM
So happy to have my mini-opera THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE UNIVERSE be part of THE BOX IS THE UNIVERSE: A TABLETOPERA. My piece was one of three mini-operas produced in a storage container with my cool collaborators The Off-Book Club as part Bricolage Production Company’s Bazaar Fundraiser!
The other two operas had librettos written by DT Burns and Lauren D’Errico, music for all 3 was by Joshua Brown, set design by Sasha Schwartz, performance by Colleen Michelle McGovern with DT Burns on puppets and heat lamps and everything else.
THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING was a non-visual sensory experience designed to be accessible for vision-impaired audiences. All audience members wore blindfolds and listened the the opera while heat-lamps were employed to create a sense of warmth and light as the universe came into existence-in just five minutes!
Pictures by Sasha Schwartz.
This summer I received a grant from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry and a Carnegie Mellon Graduate Small project Help (GuSH) Research Grant to support my travel to eastern PA to take two wilderness survival courses at Coalcracker Bushcraft! These classes were immersive research for my Bunker Cycle, a series of full-length plays about American Survivalism and doomsday preppers.
Classes included learning how to start fire numerous ways, building shelter, procuring clean water, navigation, and food deprivation! It was hard but really fun and I learned a ton about life in the woods and survival as a mentality, which I’m working into a new Bunker play, READY FOR ANYTHING.
