StageSource's New England New Play Alliance presents a diverse collection of eight new plays from some of New England's best playwrights: Windowmen by Steven Barkhimer, Splendor by Kirsten Greenidge, Hell by Fire, Hell by Ice by MJ Halberstadt, Necessary Monsters by John Kuntz, Becoming Cuba by Melinda Lopez, Priscilla Dreams the Answer by Walt McGough, Easter at the Entrée Gold by John Minigan, and Saving Kitty by Marisa Smith. Each of these plays was produced by a different New England theater company, and the depth and breadth of this exciting collection of plays shows why Boston and New England have become a hub for new work.
Gabridge, Patrick: - Patrick Gabridge is the co-founder and coordinator of the New England New Play Alliance. He is also the founder of the Playwright Submission Binge, the Rhombus Playwrights' Group (co-founder), Market InSight for Playwrights, and theater companies in New York and Denver. He is also a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. His plays include Drift, Blinders, Blood on the Snow, Lab Rats, and many other scripts that have been produced around the world (14 countries so far). His novels include Tornado Siren, Moving [a life in boxes], and Steering to Freedom. His screenplays have been optioned by several Hollywood production companies, and his radio plays have been broadcast on NPR and elsewhere. He has a passion for history and science, and spends his free time fixing up old houses and farming.
Neill, Laura: - Laura Neill is a Boston playwright. Her plays have been produced or developed by Fresh Ink Theatre, the Wilbury Theatre Group, the Dartmouth College Department of Theater, Brown Production Workshop, VoxFest, and Playwrights' Reading Room. Her play Don't Give Up the Ship, a funky feminist drama about a woman who begins acting as an 1812 war hero, premiered with Fresh Ink Theatre in February 2017. Laura is the playwright for OperaHub's new pastiche play with opera, TRUNK SHOW!: A Fashionable Fantasia of Women on the World Stage, which will premiere in Fall 2017. Laura is earning her MFA in Playwriting at Boston University, where she acted as dramaturg for Livian Yeh's Memorial in 2016. Laura's first full-length play, Faking It, was inspired by the stories of college survivors of sexual assault and was produced in the Bentley Theater at Dartmouth College in 2011. Laura won the Eleanor Frost Playwriting Award in 2012 for her one-act plays Conditions and Fall. While completing her Honors thesis on Shakespeare's history plays in 2013, Laura wrote and directed True American Love, a political drama. In 2014, she earned her Master of Arts in Teaching degree at Brown University while workshopping F.S.B., a piece about betrayal and friendship in a recovery facility. From 2014 to 2016, Laura taught English at Westwood High School, focusing on United States literature; she also partnered with Playwrights' Reading Room to host free play readings at local libraries. She was an affiliate of the 2016 Company One PlayLab. Her play Skin and Bones, a conversation between a retired theatre usher and a bouncer for a boxing match, was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Princess Grace Fellowship. Laura's play The Coming of the Lamb was a part of the 2016 Culture*Park Short Plays Marathon. Her newest plays-in-progress include The End Will Hurt, a piece that weaves together a "typical" family story with fantastical digital narratives, and Cap, or, El Limite, the story of a young woman struggling for agency amidst the charter school cap protests. Cap is currently a semi-finalist for the 2017 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. Laura runs the Youth Shakespeare Project, a tuition-free summer theater camp, with her husband Jaymes Sanchez; Laura and Jaymes founded YSP to bring theatre education to students of various socioeconomic backgrounds and have co-directed three seasons, including A Midsummer Night's Dream (2012), As You Like It (2014), and Much Ado about Nothing (2016) in Hanover, NH. Laura is a member of the Dramatists Guild, StageSource, and the New England New Play Alliance. She currently resides in Brighton, MA. Learn more at http: //laurajneill.wixsite.com/home and read selected scripts at https: //newplayexchange.org/users/1933/laura-neill.
