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Festival Weekend Playwrights

Marc Acito (Birds of a Feather)

Marc Acito is the author of two comic novels, How I Paid for College and Attack of the Theater People. He is a winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and has had his work translated into five languages he cannot read. Marc is now a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Together he and C.S. Whitcomb co-wrote Holidazed, a twisted Christmas comedy which will be revived this fall at Artists Repertory Theatre. His charming website is MarcAcito.com. Or just Facebook him.

Will Eno (Middletown)

Will Eno is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Fellow, and a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. The Flu Season premiered at The Gate Theatre in London and then opened in New York where it won the Oppenheimer Award (2004) for best debut by an American playwright. His play Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His collection of short plays Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions was produced at the Flea Theater in New York in November 2007. An excerpt of his play Tragedy: a tragedy appeared in the June 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Tragedy: a tragedy had its U.S. premiere at Berkeley Rep Theatre in March of 2008. His plays are published by Oberon Books, in London, and by TCG and PLAYSCRIPTS, in the United States. Photo by Farzad Owrang.

Jordan Harrison (Futura)

Jordan Harrison grew up in Seattle and currently lives in Brooklyn. He is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2009-2010 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Jordan’s plays include Doris to Darlene (Playwrights Horizons), Act a Lady (Portland Center Stage, 2006 Humana Festival), Finn in the Underworld (Berkeley Rep), Amazons and Their Men (Off Broadway at Clubbed Thumb), Kid-Simple (2004 Humana Festival, American Theater Company, SPF), and The Museum Play. He has received commissions from Arden Theatre, Ars Nova, Berkeley Rep/Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cypress Films, the Guthrie Theater/Children’s Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, and South Coast Rep. Jordan is the recipient of a 2008 Kesselring Fellowship, a Theater Masters’ Innovative Playwright Award, the Heideman Award, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships from The Playwrights’ Center, and a NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Grant with The Empty Space Theatre. A graduate of the Brown University MFA Creative Writing program, he is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

Naomi Iizuka (Strange Devices from the Distant West)

Naomi Iizuka’s plays include 36 Views, Anon(ymous), At the Vanishing Point, Polaroid Stories, Language of Angels, Tattoo Girl, and Skin. Her plays have been produced by the Goodman Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, the Children’s Theater Company, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the Huntington Theater, Berkeley Rep, GeVa, Portland Center Stage, the Public Theatre, Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts, the Dallas Theatre Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Next Wave Festival”, Soho Rep, and the Edinburgh Festival, and workshopped at Sundance Theatre Lab, Midwest PlayLabs, the Public Theater’s New Works Now, PS 122, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Seattle Rep. Her plays have been published by TCG, Smith and Kraus, Heineman, Playscripts, Theatre Forum, and American Theater. Her play Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West will premiere at Berkeley Rep in Spring 2010. She is currently working on commissions from Cornerstone Theatre, the Huntington Theater, Yale Rep, and the La Jolla Playhouse. Naomi is a member of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, a Joyce Foundation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, an NEA/TCG Artist in Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a PEN Center USA West Award for Drama, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Fellowship. She heads the MFA Playwriting program at the University of California, San Diego.

Kim Rosenstock (99 Ways to F*#& a Swan)

Kim Rosenstock is currently studying playwriting with Paula Vogel at the Yale School of Drama where she is a recipient of the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship. Plays include In Search Of Stanley Hammer, Tigers Be Still, Lone Pilots of Roosevelt Field, and 99 Ways to F*ck A Swan. Her work has been developed by The Kennedy Center, Ars Nova, and The Old Vic in association with The Public Theater, and New York Stage & Film. From 2005-2007 she was Associate Producer of Ars Nova in New York City where she developed and produced new works of music, comedy and theater. This summer she will serve as Artistic Director of the 2009 Yale Summer Cabaret where she will produce several shows including a new indie rock musical she is co-writing about time, fate, and blackouts, Fly-By-Night. She has a BA from Amherst College where she first began writing plays under the mentorship of Constance Congdon. She is originally from Baldwin, Long Island.

Stephanie Timm (On the Nature of Dust)

Stephanie Timm’s most recent play Picked: a grim (fairy)tale was produced as part of the Baldwin New Plays Festival, and received a workshop at the Kennedy Center/National New Play Network Play Festival with dramaturgy from Madeleine Oldham. Crumbs Are Also Bread was commissioned and produced by the Washington Ensemble Theatre, and will be published in the upcoming Rain City Projects Manifesto Series Anthology, edited by Steven Dietz. W(h)acked: An Immorality Play premiered at Live Girls! Theatre and was subsequently produced by Willamette University Theatre, where Stephanie also served as a guest artist and teacher. Stephanie wrote the script for the puppet musical extravaganza Frankenocchio: The Adventures of a Divine Boy Toy, created by Brian Kooser, produced by the Empty Space Theatre, after premiering at Monkey Wrench Theatre. Rocky Road was a finalist for the Heideman Award at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, and was produced through Theatre Masters in Colorado and New York, and at New Horizons in San Diego. Li’l Heroes was a finalist the Heideman Award, a finalist for the University of Maryland 10-minute play contest, and won Best Show Award during the Looking Glass Theatre’s Summer Play Forum in 2007. She is a founding member and resident playwright of New Century Theatre Company in Seattle, and a collaborative member of Washington Ensemble Theatre. Stephanie was recently a playwriting fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Conference and is currently finishing her MFA in Playwriting at the University of California, San Diego. Special thanks to Icicle Creek/ACT Theatre Festival for a workshop of On the Nature of Dust last summer.

Made in Oregon Playwrights

Brian Kettler (In School Suspension)

Brian Kettler recently graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A. in drama. He is also a graduate of the National Theater Institute and Theatermakers program at the Eugene O’ Neill Theatre Center. Favorite acting roles at Kenyon include Claudio in Measure for Measure and Pip/Theo in Three Days of Rain. Brian spent the past year as a SUN school drama instructor at Boise-Eliot Elementary. He is currently the drama and music specialist at MJCC day camp.

Susan Mach (The Lost Boy)

Susan Mach has an MA in Playwriting from Boston University. Her first play, Monograms, was produced at Theatre for the New City in New York, Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Portland Repertory Theatre, and the Icaras Theatre Ensemble in Ithaca, New York. The script, published by Rain City Press, also received a Drammy Award. Her second play, Angle of View, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and received readings at Portland Repertory Theatre and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. For her third play, The Shadow Testament, she received a Women Writers Fellowship from Literary Arts, Inc. This piece has been workshopped by Artists Repertory Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and JAW/West. Her play, The Difficult Season, a collaboration with renowned jazz pianist and songwriter Dave Frishberg, was workshopped at Artists Repertory Theatre. She was recently awarded a Women Writers fellowship from Literary Arts for her latest play, The Lost Boy.

Andrea Stolowitz (Bad Family)

Andrea Stolowitz is a graduate of the MFA playwriting program at the University of California San Diego. She has had her plays developed and presented at many venues including The Cherry Lane, The Old Globe, The Long Wharf, New York Stage and Film, and the Mill Mountain Theater. Previously produced work includes Knowing Cairo, Seascapes and Tales of Doomed Love. She currently teaches at Willamette University and the University of Portland and served on the theater studies faculty at Duke University and UC-San Diego. She was a Walter E. Dakin fellow at The Sewanee Writers Conference in 2005, completed a residency at Ledig House Writer’s Colony in the fall of 2006, and was awarded a North Carolina Playwrights Grant in 2007. She is an ensemble member of Playwrights West and is the Portland Regional Representative to the Dramatists Guild.

Nick Zagone (The Missing Pieces)

Nick Zagone is the award winning playwright of The DMV One, David and Goliath: a William Kunstler Story, Driving under the Influence containing the ten-minute play The Mint Juleps as well as the author of many other plays, musicals and films. He is a founding member of Open Circle Theatre in Seattle and a member of Portland Center Stage’s PlayGroup in Portland, OR where he lives.