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You drive into Salt Lake City and bang! There’s the Temple with the angel Moroni blowing his own horn, so to speak, over us all. I’m glad, because we have much to celebrate here, especially when it comes to all the new plays being heard, workshopped, produced. Some examples: The Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC) has three active new play programs The Playwrights Lab, now into its fourth year, brings playwrights from around the country for a week-long development program that, uniquely, does not wind up in a public reading. “It’s all about process and development” says Associate Artistic Director Shannon Musgrave. “Playwrights find freedom and comfort in that.” SLAC’s New Play Sounding Series has been around for 23 years. A weekend of rehearsals rounds off in a public reading in front of what has become a very loyal audience. DG Travelling Master Robert Askins’ play The Squirrels, was recently heard there. Finally, SLAC’s program for playwrights under 35 is in partnership with The David Ross Fetzer Foundation for Emerging Artists. A chosen play receives a week-long workshop culminating in a public reading and talkback. “We’re always thinking about what this community will respond to,” says Musgrave. “Stories that don’t often get told but that ought to be told. We like to expand the norm, challenge our audiences, lean in to their adventurous spirit.”

At Pioneer Theatre, the new play program has been greatly expanded since the appointment of Karen Azenberg as Artistic Director in 2012. She inaugurated the Play-by-Play reading series, which offers 30 hours of rehearsal culminating in three public readings. Some of the plays end up produced on the main stage. “At first, I reached out to playwrights and directors that I knew… what do you have that would benefit from a week of time that would be useful to the play? The first year I read 25 plays. This is our fourth year, and now I read about 80 plays.” She is assisted in her choice of plays by playwright Matt Bennett, who works as the Assistant Business Manager at the theatre. “I always respond to story,” Azenberg says. “Tell me a story. I am always looking for bigger plays as well as small plays. Four-character plays are very popular right now but because of the size of Pioneer Theatre I’m very excited by large cast plays. I would love to produce three new plays in a season but I can’t. But I love to support work that I think is terrific. It’s a way to support some folks for a moment.”

PlanB Theatre’s mission is to produce unique, socially conscious theatre, with a distinctly local focus. “I will read any play by any playwright based in Utah,” says PlanB Theatre’s Artistic Director Jerry Rapier. Increasingly, the plays they produce come out of the theatre’s ongoing Lab, where thirteen playwrights meet monthly to hear and discuss their work. “We develop relationships with playwrights rather than plays,” Rapier says. “We invest in where the playwright wants to go next.” Lab member Elaine Jarvic’s first play for children, River. Swamp. Cave. Mountain. is scheduled for next season. “Elaine has worked with children struggling with grief and this play came out of that work,” Rapier says. Eric Samuelson’s The Ice Front, which was heard at Pioneer Theatre’s Play-by-Play, is also part of the season at PlanB. “It’s not about a local topic. It’s about actors from the Norwegian National Theatre during the German occupation of Norway. It’s about Eric’s ancestors, and everything that matters to him is all in this one play. It’s very meaningful to him, so it’s very meaningful to us.”

kcahill@dramatistsguild.com

@dramatistsguild

Here’s some good news: two professional theatres in the Utah Region are seeking new plays by young writers to honor David Fetzer.

David Ross Fetzer was an actor in Salt Lake, a young man with a spray of wild hair who always looked intriguing and packed a big wallop as an actor. He performed extensively in theatre productions locally as well as in film in Los Angeles. He could be quirky or ordinary, confused or vulnerable, calm or agitated. His gifts were strong and numerous. He died suddenly in December 2012, three days after his thirtieth birthday, a total surprise and a tragic loss. At the time, David was in the process of starting a new theatre in this town. New Works Theatre Machine was dedicated to attracting eighteen to 35-year olds to the theatre and by the time David died, had produced two plays, both of them edgy, surprising, frightening, and disarming.

Within a year of his death, his family and friends, led by his mother, Betsy Ross, created The David Ross Fetzer Foundation for Emerging Artists, dedicated to encouraging the work of young filmmakers and playwrights under the age of 35. The result is that two professional theatres in Salt Lake City are teaming up with the foundation to further the theatre goals valued by David Fetzer.

Salt Lake Acting Company advertises nationally for plays by young writers under the age of 35 and gives the winner a week of rehearsals with a professional company, culminating in a staged reading at the theatre. The first winner of the Davey was Katherine Vondy’s The Fermi Paradox, which was read in August 2015. The second annual competition is underway, deadline February 2016, with a weeklong workshop and reading planned for next summer.

Plan-B Theatre, in keeping with its mission to produce new plays by local writers, advertises locally for playwrights under 35 “with a Utah connection.” The winning play is given a full production as a part of the theatre’s four-play season. The first winner of the Davey was produced in the winter of 2014, Carleton Bluford’s Mama. That play eventually won City Weekly’s Award for Best Original Play and Best Theatre Production. The second winner of the Davey at Plan-B just completed production, Rob Tennant’s Booksmart. The next two winners have been announced, Morag Shepherd’s Not One Drop, to be produced next season, and Austin Archer’s Jump, to be produced the season following.

When interviewed for this article, Shannon Musgrave, Associate Artistic Director at Salt Lake Acting Company, in charge of new work, said they are looking for plays that match Fetzer’s spirit. Then she quoted Fetzer’s own criteria, “Plays that incorporate new and unconventional ways of telling stories and that create for an audience an unexpected and engaging experience.”

Jerry Rapier, Artistic Director of Plan-B Theatre, said they seek plays that fit David’s aesthetic and their own mission “to produce unique and socially conscious theatre with a focus on new plays by Utah playwrights.”

Guild members are encouraged to check out the David Ross Fetzer Foundation and its involvement with both Salt Lake Acting Company and Plan-B Theatre. Playwrights under the age of 35 are in demand!

jjensen@dramatistsguild.com

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Kathleen Cahill had not intended to be a playwright. Not originally, anyway. She set out to be a bookwriter/lyricist for musicals. She even got an MFA in Music Theatre from NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts.

Her produced musicals include Friendship of the Sea, Dakota Sky, and an opera, Clara. She is also listed as one of the top 25 songwriters in the Directory of Musical Theatre Writers.

In other words, she was following her path and doing well. Though she’s an impatient sort. “It takes so much time to write a musical,” she admitted.

Well, then, one thing led to another, and she ended up moving to Salt Lake City.

Why would a native New Englander move to the city of Saints? It had to do with children and the children of children. But the more important question is, how did the move affect her career, her work?

“When I came here, I liked what I was writing, and I felt freer,” said Kathleen. “I don’t know why.”

That’s hard for some people elsewhere to understand or believe. But there it is. In Salt Lake City, she felt freer.

That ebullience produced three rather ebullient plays: Charm, The Persian Quarter, and Course 86B in the Catalogue. Each of them premiered at Salt Lake Acting Company and then went on to productions in Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts. She also got an agent, a publisher, and the title of Resident Playwright at Salt Lake Acting Company; in addition, she also taught playwriting at the University of Utah and wrote lyrics for David Zabriskie’s Requiem.

Rather a successful time of it, here in the lap of Zion.

All this from a person who grew up in New England, went to school in New England, a person who wrote the introductions to the Masterpiece series on PBS for 30 years. You can hardly get more New England than that!

And yet here she is in Salt Lake City, in just about the reddest state in the nation, where there are Mormons, out-loud sexism and legislative idiocy.

That seems not to stop her. This fall her newest piece, Fatal Song, will be produced by Utah Opera. She calls it an opera/cabaret, for which she has brought together heroines from eleven operas. In a single night, the audience hears and sees the greatest music ever written for the human voice. All of them female voices. The piece promises to be both artistically inviting and politically revealing. “They do have to kill off the women,” says Kathleen, “let me count the ways!”

Is that not enough? Very well….

At this very minute, Kathleen is at work on a play called Cotton, about the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, where young immigrant girls wove cotton for the world, the raw material grown by slaves in the South.

It’s a helluvah good idea. Not often acknowledged in the North, or for that matter, anywhere else in this country.

Yes, Kathleen is political and out loud about it. She’s not red, not a Mormon, and she has little patience with legislative idiocy. Yet she’s freer here than anywhere else she has ever lived.

And that’s what’s up in the City of Saints, here on the shores of the Great Salt Lake!

jjensen@dramatistsguild.com

Kathleen Cahill