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“I’m still so new to playwriting that every piece seems like an unknown adventure.”

After talking to Brooke Jennett one year after she won the 2016 Dramatists Guild Young Playwrights Award and graduated from Transylvania University, I was struck by the kaleidoscope-like way she weaves her life experiences into each step of her artistic life. It started when she had to decide what route to take after working several food service jobs and finding a love of cooking for her family and friends.  Setting that up against a stronger passion brewing since childhood, she realized that “I want to write for other people and cook for myself,” and chose a creative writing program over culinary school. Her current project and first novel is about a young woman “faced with a lot of death who finds out she’s a necromancer.” This subject comes from a time when Jennett was caught up with “others going through the process of dealing with death.” Because she didn’t “have the life experience to cope” she sought counseling and also decided to “make death funny” as both a help to others and an acknowledgment that “we’re all going to die so [it’s important] what do we do in the meantime.“
Jennett says that the only consistent thing about her writing is humor. Describing her work [theatrical writing] further she states that “I can’t think of one common theme in any of my plays and I hope I never find one!” She goes on to explain that “I try to avoid absolutes in life—they box you into principles and promises you may not be able to keep.” That leads into Jennett’s  interest in writing Young Adult fiction “for people in their 20s” because of the 21st century pressures in the “first quarter of life” that have shifted from the earlier emphasis on having kids to the current preoccupation with successful careers and making money. “Happiness is the hardest thing to attain in your 20s because everything is so fluid,” though “if you are doing something toward fulfilling your passion that is all anyone should ask.” Theatre is a somewhat new passion for Jennett since she didn’t discover playwriting until she was in college and took a class. “I fell in love immediately.”  This feeling was strengthened when she performed in a Sheila Callaghan play: “it’s the one that made me want to do theatre…and I thought, ‘Hey, I could do this forever.” The Callaghan play also whetted her appetite for “fantastical theatre based in reality” and circles back to the choice of featuring a necromancer in her novel: “the idea of how we grieve through a fantastical element.”
Something else that is becoming more important in Jennett’s life and work is the increasingly persistent political climate. After graduation she remained in Lexington, Kentucky and describes it as a “blue city in a red state.” This has been a boon for her personal consciousness-raising as she is finding there that her generation wants to discuss politics in a way that shares perspectives rather than closing ranks. She is also surprised to discover how “aggressive” theatre is at times in “showing what is right…not like propaganda but makes you think.” Her own contributions include the piece she wrote for the Horizon Theatre Young Playwrights Festival. Three Is Company is about racial insecurity in a “blended” family Her current play project is based on the virulent anti-gay protests by members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. In that piece she “combines a figure in the church with Joan of Arc as the character is manipulated and vilified like Joan.” Jennett is also co-editor of the play anthology Mother#^%#! College Life with Michael Bigelow Dixon.
Jennett ended our interview by indicating that “my friends are the biggest influences in my life” and that “my favorite way to beat writer’s block is peer review.” She says her generation is “grassroots, innovative, and adaptable. We’re going everywhere fast.”

pturner@dramatistsguild.com

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Jo Howarth (Noonan) was a beloved and highly-respected Atlanta-based actor who was also an important role model for other, particularly women, theatre professionals. As her close friend, actor-writer Topher Payne put it, “she was the comeback kid” – a woman who left a blossoming acting career to raise children and then returned as an “over-forty” to face the “double headwinds of age and gender.” But she made it work, with accolades and awards including recognition in 2015 as one of Atlanta’s ten best local actresses. Despite that, Howarth would lament to her husband Patrick Noonan about the insecurities of finding roles for “older women” and the sense that her career might soon be over. His response that people would continue wanting to work with her because she was “a professional who respected what it means to be an actor” was borne out by the mixture of momentous grief and high praise that poured out when she passed away unexpectedly in June 2015, at the age of 58.

Out of this devastating loss, Patrick Noonan was determined to find a way to remember and honor his wife of 30 years. The result is The Jo Howarth Noonan Foundation for the Performing Arts and the first of what is intended to be an annual Mojo Fest of commissioned new work “with substantial roles for older women.” The non-profit foundation is also more broadly “dedicated to promoting and celebrating women theater artists over the age of 40.” In talking about this foundation, Noonan mentioned that “what Jo brought to a project or conversation was life experience(s).” So it made sense to start something that provided both “the work –not just roles but good roles” and “the richness of stories about older women.” The intended future of the foundation and Mojo Fest is ambitious: they hope the yearly commissions will develop a pool of good work that will be in demand across the country and become a treasured source “for a great selection of plays.” Noonan intends to nudge this along with outreach to actors and artistic directors.

With all of the excitement generated by the first Mojo Fest event last March, it was especially gratifying to see a strong presence by Guild members. Jill Patrick is a member (and former Managing Artistic Director of Working Title Playwrights) and served as producer for the Fest. Sherry Camp Paulsen, Penny Mickelbury, and I wrote three of the five commissioned ten-minute plays presented as staged readings and the evening reading was a pre-existing full-length script by Margaret Baldwin. The other two commissioned playwrights were Suehyla El-Attar and Payne. Patrick reported that Out-of-Box Theatre AD Carolyn Choe has decided to produce all of the ten-minute pieces later in the year.

The commissioned pieces were required to have the primary character be a woman over 40. The result was five plays with all-female casts of diverse ages. The directors were all women as well and nearly as diverse in age as the casts. As Paulsen remarked, “Working exclusively with women on a project about women was exhilarating. A spirited shorthand developed between us as we rehearsed and revised the script.” She also mentioned that the reading and feedback session made her realize what her play (set in a Nordstrom’s Lingerie Department) was really about and immediately changed the title from Catch and Release to TMI. That seemed especially appropriate with a play about a straying husband and “the technological age gap between baby boomer and millennial women.”

Guiding the feedback was DG member Daphne Mintz, who made her own discovery. “In prep for moderating the talkbacks…I focused on finding both shared and unique themes pertinent to what I could only describe as the predicament of being a woman. When this phrase entered my head, I bristled… But as I focused on how these plays fit into the [foundation] mission…the term took hold. If being a woman is something to celebrate, to honor…there must be challenges resulting in both victories and failures associated with that condition.”

More info: https://www.johowarthnoonan.org/

pturner@dramatistsguild.com

Actors and playwrights in Mojo Fest. Photo credit Patrick Noonan

Sherry Camp Paulsen. Photo credit Larry Paulsen

Jo Howarth Noonan in The Flying Carpet Theatre Company’s 2010 production of The Medicine Showdown

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It’ s two days into the new year and Manuel’ s Tavern, the iconic soul of in-town Atlanta since 1956 has shut down for renovations by a new “outsider” owner. I’ m scared. It won’ t be the same. Then, I remember an interview with author Ray Bradbury who preached that life should be about standing on the edge of a cliff, jumping off, and then making wings on the way down. Okay. Scary can also be exhilarating: a new beginning. 

With this in mind, I’ d like to acknowledge the changes happening at Working Title Playwrights as Managing Artistic Director (and DG member) Jill Patrick steps (jumps!) down to focus on her own writing projects. She has been director since 2006, and with the conviction that it is time for new “blood” will officially transfer from staff to board member by February 2016. 

A commanding and charismatic presence, Jill has increased both membership and community relations while developing expanded programming such as the Ethel Wilson Lab and the 24-Hour plays. Now Patrick’ s successor, theatre director Amber Bradshaw, is ready to take her own leap and there for the ride is DG member playwright Paul Donnelly who joined the board in 2013. As part of a writers’  community “from the late ‘ 70s until [he] left the DC area in 2009,” Donnelly credits WTP as an important part of his re-engagement into writing and makes assurance that the “Monday Night Critic Sessions…are invaluable and will always be the core of what we do” [springing from] “the impulse to serve writers.” But Donnelly admits that he is most excited about finding ways to “enhance the community of artists participating…expanding the range of voices we serve…whether that’ s generationally or artistically.” He mentions the support that theatres such as the Alliance and Essential have given to WTP and says that increasing that roster of collaborative partners is likely to be part of the new strategy as is further development of financial sponsors and “enhancing [our] public profile.” Personally, he hopes to help with strengthening WTP’ s administrative structure. “The greatest enemy to any of these plans,” says Donnelly, “is being discouraged by the fact that it isn’ t easy.” Amen, Brother. www.WorkingTitlePlaywrights.com.

Another DG member taking the leap was Nedra Pezold Roberts who decided five years ago to trade her extensive teaching and academic writing career in favor of becoming a playwright. “I just couldn’ t juggle creative writing” [along with everything else] so I ‘ retired’ .”The first two years were pretty tough, but “I seem to be finding lots of traction over the past threeyears.” Now Roberts’  name just keeps popping up everywhere, from a recent reading of Wash, Dry, Fold at Essential Theatre, which is now scheduled for production at Chicago Street Theatre in May-June 2016 after winning the AACT 2015 NewPlayFest, to earlier news that Vanishing Point won the AACT 2013 NewPlayFest and the 2013 Southeast Playwrights Competition, to an article “Thoughts on the Playwright’ s Experience” in both The Purple Pros on-line magazine and The Atlanta Writers Club eQuill. There are many more productions, readings, and awards, including Roberts’  note that “the craziest thing was in June 2015 when I had not one but two plays running simultaneously in New York City.” Maybe she knows crazy by way of being a native “New Orleanian”–“I passed my childhood and early adult life falling in love with my city”– who calls it “the touchstone for my soul.” At least one of her plays takes characters “straight out of the New Orleans I know,” though she says that all of her plays begin with “voices in my head, snatches of conversation…that won’ t leave me alone…” Roberts has taken to heart a quote from Lillian Hellman (my paraphrase) that when stage lights come up they come up on trouble, and also one from Athol Fugard that “The playwright’ s job is to figure out what to tell and when to tell it.” In response to the latter, she adds “I think my obligation to an audience is to engage their minds as well as their emotions.” Perhaps the “mind” part comes from learning “early in my teaching career that I needed to pay attention to what my students were hearing when I explained something…to anticipate their confusion and short-circuit it with clarity.” As for the emotion part, take note of an audience who had fallen in love with her “Uncle Slack character” (a Vietnam P.O.W.) in Wash, Dry, Fold and “became very vocal in their objections to his dying at the end of the play (reading, Dayton Playhouse’ s 2014 Future Fest). Afterward, a stagehand who was also a Vietnam veteran came up to Roberts with tears in his eyes and said, “Don’ t listen to them. You did the right thing. You gave Slack the only way to get out of his cage. You set him free.” Making wings. www.nedrapezoldroberts.com 

Playwright Nedra Pezold Roberts, photo credit Cati Teague Photography

Skydiving Playwright – Jill Patrick - photo credit Perry Patrick

Jill Patrick headshot – photo credit Perry Patrick

pturner@dramatistsguild.com

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At first it seemed a little silly, on this night in muggy, buggy August, watching a bunch of audience members wearing their grandma’s love beads, climbing in and out of the “Magic Bus” (aka, the box office), and throwing around peace signs like cheap money – well, puleeeze. But then we got to a clearing in the woods where a good share of the Atlanta theatre community were wiggling like excited kids in vintage chairs alongside the rest of the lucky ticketholders in (yet another) sold-out show and I noticed how many twinkly little fireflies there are away from the city and heard the opening strains of “Aquarius” and … okay, it was really cool. This was Serenbe Playhouse, which bills itself as a “pioneer in modeling Green Theatre Practices with a commitment to social responsibility and environmental stewardship.” As with Hair, they walk their talk by performing outdoors with high production values that are still “in concert with nature” including building with “reclaimed and recycled materials” and using both “natural light and 90% LED theatrical lighting.”

Executive/Artistic Director Brian Clowdus founded Serenbe Playhouse in 2009, after receiving a Theatre and Dance degree from Amherst and an Acting MFA from The University of South Carolina, and then serving as a 2011 Fellow at Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. Billing himself as an actor, educator, director, and producer, he has quickly managed to draw a contingent of stellar actors, directors, and designers to Serenbe as well as loyal audiences from all around the Atlanta metro area. Before seeing Hair, several people had urged me to visit the “really unique” theatre in a planned community about 30 minutes south of Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport that “passionately explores, embraces, and expands the connections between nature, culture and the art of living,” and where forward thinking residents have founded the non-profit Serenbe Institute for Art, Culture, & the Environment. It now includes Serenbe Playhouse, AIR (an artist in residence program), and the Serenbe Photography Center. Soon to come is a Serenbe Film Festival.

Clowdus himself is a high-energy dreamer with one foot still on the solid ground of practicality. He knows his community well and his season includes theatre for adults as well as children, the latter well served by, among other productions, DG member and (previously Atlanta-based) playwright Rachel Teagle’s adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and The Velveteen Rabbit. These award-winning productions and others are performed in magical places around Serenbe like The Grange Creek, The Wildflower Meadow, The Forest Glen Stage (near The Tree house), and The Farmer’s Market Clearing. As a participant in Atlanta Region’s DG Dramatist/Director Exchange last March, Clowdus spoke about his desire to incorporate new work slowly in tune with his ability to build audience. When I asked him more recently if Serenbe would be a place (still) hospitable to (particularly) local playwrights, he responded in the affirmative, reporting that he had produced a regional world premiere musical (last year’s Time Between Us) along with three of Teagle’s world premiere Family Shows. “I have a strong commitment to new work and always welcome new scripts. The first question is, ‘Will it work outside?’ If it doesn’t, it’s definitely not a right fit. Small casts are paramount as well. A brief letter with synopsis, location and character breakdown is what I always read first. If my interest is piqued I will carve out time to read the whole script.” Personally, this sounds like a stellar opportunity to flex all kinds of creative muscles. In the meantime, I’m heading back in October for The Sleepy Hollow Experience. (whisper) It’s gonna be in The Serenbe Stables.

pturner@dramatistsguild.com

Ryan Ortega, Sam Constantino & Kelli Owens in Serenbe Playhouse’s The Velveteen Rabbit. Photos by Breeanne Clowdus.