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2008 New American Playwrights Project

Presented by Utah Shakespearean Festival at Auditorium Theatre - Southern Utah University

August 7-August 29, 2008

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The Utah Shakespearean Festival recently announced the three playwrights who will participate in the 2008 New American Playwrights Project. This year the project will feature works by Matthew Ivan Bennett from Salt Lake City, Utah, T.J. Edwards from Brooklyn, New York, and David Rush from Chicago, Illinois. The three playwrights will workshop their new scripts with a dramaturg and a team of actors and directors to polish their plays and present them in staged readings for the public. Intended to encourage the development of new plays, the New American Playwrights Project focuses on western playwrights, giving attention to western subjects, characters, experiences and themes. New plays featuring classical themes and subjects are occasionally chosen. Di Esperienza delves headlong into the mortal Leonardo, and examines the edges where myth and reality meet. The name Leonardo da Vinci conjures an archetypal image: a sagely old man with a beard and beret. He seems almost godlike. Yet, like most of us, he was plagued with self-doubt. He procrastinated. He wondered who he was. Father Mike is a gentle, nostalgic comedy that takes place in 1955. In the play, a Catholic family struggles with questions of faith, change and love in an innocent American era. Germinous Seeds uses Herman Melville's life and work as a point of departure for three interrelated stories. Together they weave an intriguing exploration of the mystery of human identities and the inability to connect. As a tour de force, two actors perform three roles each.