The 2010-2011 Interstate 73 Writers Group

~Robert Askins~
~Madeline George~
~Mary Hamilton~
~Greg Keller~
~Michael Mitnick~
~Megan Mostyn-Brown~
~Richard Toth~

The good news is, this fall we’ll have an exciting new group of playwrights! We’ll be announcing them toward the end of the summer.

In unrelated news, Molly Rice (one of the participants in this year’s residency and playwright extraordinaire) just posted a really lovely and interesting entry on the Kenyon Review blog.  She’s up at Choate working with teens.  What she’s doing is truly fascinating.

We’ll miss these guys.  (And thanks, Krista, for this brilliant brainchild.)

We’re working with Zoe again on a second reading of The Wife. The reading is going to be probably in the second week of March. Tommy and May (Adrales) have asked that the cast meet for a couple of hours of rehearsal in the morning; they’re then going to present a reading to a very small invited audience in the afternoon. Tommy wants to gauge initial audience reaction. The play is dark dark dark. It’s quiet and funny at first (after the first reading, one of the actors emailed us to tell us that she thought the play was “Pinter-esque”). But then it takes a turn and becomes fairly dark. (By the way, the blurry camera photo on the left shows Tommy’s back, May’s profile and Barrett in mid-reading.)

Of course, we’re still hoping that Renee Zellwegger agrees to star in it when it’s produced on Broadway.

By the way, this totally depressed us.  The first few paragraphs reminded us of that profile in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times about struggling artists in the New York City Off-Off-Broadway scene.  Nothing like a good cheer-me-up on a gloomy February afternoon.

We’ve come up with a haiku, celebrating the hard work and tenacity of the two casting directors who have been working on these readings (The Wife by Tommy Smith, directed by May Adrales; Mother Earth by Andy Bragen, directed by Jackson Gay).  Really, the following haiku is dedicated to all casting directors who, as far as we’re concerned, are the unsung heroes of this business:

Angie, Gwyneth, Reese,
Emma, Meryl, Cate and Madge —  
They do theater, no?