Letters to Hestia, a full circle performance of death and rebirth, is a play that includes poetry, song, dance, and ritual.

Linda Marie Cossa holds a B.A. and a B.F.A. from the University of Hawaii and a M.F.A. in painting with a Minor in Women’s Studies from the University of South Florida. She is a symbolist, a writer, and an intuitive, who teaches Expressive Arts and offers intuitive readings using two divination decks of her own creation. In June she will assume the role of Hostess for the Austin Poetry Society’s monthly public poetry readings, held at New World Deli the last Thursday evening of each month.

INFO/RESERVATIONS:
info@scriptworks.org; 512-454-9727

Nationally recognized playwright Caridad Svich, of Salvage Vanguard Theatre’s Fugitive Pieces, Thrush, and Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), guides you through a group and individual writing process to write a fast first draft of a new play in five weeks.

Open yourself to diving into character work and structuring new writing, reading different models and applying them to thinking about live performance using methodology geared toward creative visualization, dreaming and re-mapping dramaturgical strategies for the stage.

Enrollment is limited, so claim your spot today!

ABOUT CARIDAD SVICH
Caridad Svich is a highly-awarded US Latina playwright, translator, songwriter, lyricist and editor. Svich was awarded the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende. Her theatre pieces and songs, written in English and Spanish, have been presented across the US and abroad at diverse venues including Denver Center Theatre, Teatro Mexico (Quito, Ecuador), and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK.  She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, founder of NoPassport theater alliance & press, associate editor of Routledge/UK’s Contemporary Theatre Review, contributing editor of TheatreForum, and Drama Editor for Asymptote international translation magazine. Svich is astutely entered in the .

MAGICAL OBJECTS

There is a great difference between a prop and an object on stage that is built or filled with the dramatic forces of a play.  Such objects become metaphors, they become fresh comprehensions of the world. In the theatre, we believe in magic.  Our gaze is focused on ordinary objects…a glass figurine, a pair of shoes, a wedding dress…and then our attention is shaped, and charged, and we watch the everyday grow in meaning and power.  Most of our greatest plays, written by our most poetic playwrights, contain a visual metaphor, an object with metaphorical weight that we can see on stage, not just in our mind’s eye.

How do we make the ordinary into the extraordinary?  How do we create something that can carry meaning across the stage, into the audience and then out of the theatre, all the way home, and into the lives of these strangers who come to sit together in the dark?  How do we generate a magical object on stage?

It will help if you have more than a passing relationship with A Streetcar Named Desire, The Piano Lesson, and Buried Child, but if you don’t you’ll still do okay.

We’ll be talking about the magical object, and there will be a small in class writing assignment.

Sherry Kramer is currently a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.  She is a graduate of both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and was former head of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her plays have been produced in theaters across the country and abroad.  She is a recipient of N E A, New York Foundation for the Arts and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Playwriting Award and a New York Drama League Award (WHAT A MAN WEIGHS), the LA Women in Theater New Play Award (THE WALL OF WATER), The Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (DAVID’S REDHAIRED DEATH).  She was the first national member of New Dramatists, and is on the permanent faculty at Bennington College.

Based on the parable of the prodigal son, SONS OF BENNET tells the story of a modern family in which such labels become blurred and defy definition; but the play also remains true to the ancient parable, which proclaims the triumph of familial bonds and the undying transcendence of love.  The play retells the ancient story in the context of a contemporary American family

Published writings by Lon Rogers include a novel, short stories, stage plays, and articles in medical journals. He lives in Dallas, Texas

JACOB’S LADDER chronicles a little-known two week period during the FDR administration in 1944 when the controversial and ultimately volatile proposal of possibly bombing the Concentration Camps in Eastern Europe was heatedly debated in the highest echelons of Washington DC. The story is personalized through the eyes of Jacob Greenstein, a young Harvard-educated Jewish aide to President Roosevelt, who makes a decision that throws both his personal and professional life into a vortex of moral turmoil that mirrors the global debate that was taking place during the height of World War II.

Dennis Bailey began his career as a Broadway actor in New York City, also working extensively in regional theater before venturing to Los Angeles to expand his resume to include TV and film. His performing led to a writing career, with his first play, TELEGRAM FROM HEAVEN (co-written with Dinah Manoff) enjoying extended runs in Los Angeles and Chicago. David Mixner has been a writer, keenly influential activist and respected political strategist for over three decades. They first collaborated on a non-fiction book, BRAVE JOURNEYS which debuted at #1 on The Los Angeles Times bestseller list in early 2000, then a screenplay, FIRE IN THE SOUL, about the tragic and deadly Colorado coalminers’ strike of 1914. Their most recent piece, JACOB’S LADDER, has had successful readings in both Los Angeles and New York City. David. Mixner is currently concentrating his efforts on political consultation as well as his successful political blog Live From Hell’s Kitchen while Mr. Bailey’s solo effort JUST OUTSIDE REDEMPTION, based on one of the stories in BRAVE JOURNEYS, will open at the City Theater in Austin this fall.

This year’s ingredients were:

1) Write a play with three hundred characters that takes place over 3000 years.
2) Include a children’s song, game or fairy tale.
3) Include a sound that everyone hears differently.

At the end of the Fling, the plays were read in a ScriptWorks Salon at the State Theater. A selection committee picked eight of the plays to produce in the Out of Ink Festival. The selection committee included ScriptWorks co-founder Emily Cicchini, non-applying member Rhonda Kulhanek, and Cleveland Playhouse Artistic Associate, Corey Atkins.

The Sound Off scripts were written by:

Bob Barr, Elizabeth Cobbe, Trey Deason, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Aimée Gonzalez, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Anne Maria Newsome and C. Denby Swanson.  The plays will be performed by an ensemble of actors including Sarah Bading, Beth Burroughs, Amy Chang, David DuBose, Anna Maria Garcia, Heather Hanna, Anne Hulsman,  Rhonda Kulhanek, Jenny Lavery, Christopher Loveless, Jason Phelps and Aron Taylor. They’ll be directed by Lowell Bartholomee, Debbie Lynn Carriger, Ellie McBride, Jason Phelps, and Sharon Sparlin with dramaturgy by Kristin Harrison. Designers for the project are Robert Fisher, Pam Friday, George Marsolek, and Jennifer Rogers.

OUT OF INK 2012: SOUND OFF

ScriptWork’s 14th Annual Ten Minute Play Showcase
Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Rd.
April 19-21 and 26-28, 2012 at 8 PM
Tickets:  $15 general admission, $12 students/seniors/ScriptWorks
April 19th is a Pay-What-You-Wish preview
$25 includes pre-show reception at Zhi Tea (4607 Bolm Road) and performance on Saturday, April 21st

Purchase tickets online.

Some decades after the death (?) of Christ, a young man, Philip, has taken on the responsibility of recording the account of Christ’s life – a Gospel- utilizing the only true resources available to him.  Yet, how have human insecurities, flaws, and desires worked to affect one of the most influential documents in Western culture?

Jason Lites wrote his first play about a divorcing couple and a muffin during his sophomore year of college and has never been the same since.  His plays have been performed at California State University San Bernardino, The University of Hull, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Barnyard Theatre, the Fictitious Theatre Company, and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.

In the harsh, dangerous swamps of the Florida coast, there sits the desolate town of Babylon with a pro-wrestling ring all its own. A stranger wanders into town and challenges the local hero to a battle, only to become suddenly the very best of friends. The two men begin a journey into the swamps, where they challenge the very idea of mortality and what it means to be human. An adaptation of the ancient Sumerian epic, the story is about discovering grace.

Elizabeth Cobbe is a writer. She writes theater reviews for the Austin Chronicle, and she sometimes has productions of her plays. She’s been fascinated with the story of Gilgamesh for a long time now.

FOUND STORYTELLING WORKSHOP

Wednesday, March 7th, 7-10pm
The State Theatre, 719 Congress Ave.

COST: $20 ScriptWorks members/ $30 General
INFO/RESERVATIONS: info@scriptworks.org; 512-454-9727

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP:

In this three-hour workshop, participants explore the narrative material of self and environment through place, memory and improvisation – using both fiction and documentary as storytelling material.

How to structure a found story? We will explore our seed stories through archetype, fairy tale and macro-dramaturgical analysis of time, character and place. Stories will be further developed through partner writing, acting exercises and improvisation in the group.

ABOUT MICAH MAGEE
Micah Magee is an award-winning writer and filmmaker based in Berlin, Germany and Troy, New York. In the past, Micah has worked as co-director of Cinematexas Film Festival, pirate radio programmer and (currently) full-time mom. She holds two undergraduate degrees from UT Austin (B.A. Plan II Liberal Arts/B.S. Film Production) and attended graduate school in directing at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. She has taught writing and filmmaking in Berlin, Istanbul and the Ukraine. Micah has received a Fulbright Award in Journalism, a screenwriting fellowship from NYFA and an individual artist grant from NYSCA. Her latest film HEIMKOMMEN can be seen this year in competition at SXSW.

Planeta meX is the story of Celeste, a self-destructive party girl slumming with her friends across the Mexican border. While the very real threat of drug violence rages outside, Celeste is inside a garish nightclub, using drugs and casual sex to obliterate the thought of her destructive parents and her gifted brother’s tragic and untimely death. An encounter with a mysterious drug dealer who offers her a magical drug, obsidiana, leads her on a hellish descent into a psychological underworld of terror, memory… and eventually the truth
that is her salvation.

Florinda Flores is a playwright from Laredo, TX now living in San Antonio. She judged the 2001 Scenarios, U.S.A script contest in New York City and now serves as a consultant for El Teatro Chicano de Laredo. Florinda holds a B.A. in Theater and Dance from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Goddard College. She currently teaches English at San Antonio College.