Current Playwrights in the Ohio University MFA Playwriting Program:
Third Years
Sarah Bowden, Ira Gamerman, Andrew Black, and Leean Kim Torske (Photo by Hannah Van Brunt)
Andrew Black was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, and migrated to San Francisco, California in 1979. His undergraduate degree in Radio/TV from Indiana University led to a career writing scripts for corporate training programs and business consulting. He was involved in the underground theatre scene in San Francisco's South of Market area for a number of years before writing his first full-length play Porn Yesterday in 2001. The tale of a gay male porno star who wants to change his life (co-written with Patricia Milton) was a finalist in a national playwriting contest in 2002, and was produced by the Fritz Theatre Company in San Diego in 2003. Several other productions of PY have followed. A second play (also written with Patricia), Strange Bedfellows followed. SB will have its world premiere at Theater Out in Orange County in August of 2012. A commission to write a murder mystery led to It's Murder Mary! produced by the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 2008.
(""Hilarious, high-spirited fun for everyone...Irresistible!" said Lee Hartgrave in his column, Beyond Chron.) Other productions have followed. Andrew became involved with the SF Bay
Area's PlayGround group, a company specializing in short format plays, and he has had ten-
minute plays produced across the country. Topics have ranged from gay penguins trying to get
onto Noah's Ark to an ill-fated romance between the action figure G.I. Joe and Barbie's long-
term boyfriend Ken. Andrew won the New Works of Merit contest sponsored by the 13th Street
Repertory Company in NYC for his play Another Dude's Slingbacks, and a production
is being scheduled there. His play The Second Weekend in September received its World Premiere at the City Lights Theatre, San Jose in 2010. His second-year play Bitten by a Boomslang was produced in the 17th Seabury Quinn Jr., Playwrights Festival and read at the National Theater of Ghana in the summer of 2011. He is currently working on his thesis play Puppetz.
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Sarah Bowden Faster than an encroaching deadline, more powerful than the lure of the American Dream, and able to plow through tall stacks of comics in a single sitting: Sarah Bowden emerged from Smallville, Illinois a mild-mannered Midwestern playwright by day and a tomboy with a vengeance by night. Sarah sidekicked it for two years on behalf of Philadelphia's To The Wall Productions, where she served as an artistic associate. She co-wrote Grimm & Tonic: An Evening of Adapted Fairy Tales for To The Wall, and had her short play Through the Valley performed as part of the Philadelphia Dramatists Center's 4x4 Festival. Her full-length, Two Sides of a River, was given a staged reading at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. Now earning her MFA at Ohio University, two of Sarah's full-length plays, Crayola Mobile Home and Lively Stones, have been read in the School of Theater's annual Playwrights Festival. Sarah has completed internships with Chicago Dramatists, the Arden Theatre, the Wilma Theatre, the Northlight Theatre, the O'Neill Center and the Adirondack Theatre Festival. Sarah was the recipient of the 2003 Margaret W. Baker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 White-Howells English Prize for Drama, both of which currently hang in her Fortress of Solitude.
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Ira Gamerman is a neurotically quirky Indie-Rock playwright from Baltimore Maryland who received his B.A. in Theatre from Towson University. His award-winning plays include Split (Voted "Best Play Of The Year" 2008 By the Columbus Dispatch), Dated: A Cautionary Tale For Facebook Users (2009 New York Innovative Theatre Award Nominee for best short script), I'll Hear It When I See It (Winner: 2011 JFK Legacy Award from The Kennedy Center, Shortlist: 2011 Short & Sweet Auckland & Melbourne), The Best Secret Santa Present Ever In The History Of Peckinpaw High School (2011 KCACTF National Finalist: John Cauble Award For Outstanding Short Play), and A Girl With A Black Eye (Finalist UMBC's 2006 "In 10" National short play festival). His plays have been produced and developed around the United States and Australia by such companies as: Collaboraction (at The Steppenwolf Garage), DC's Source Festival, Chicago Dramatists' First Draft Series, The Chicago New Media Summit, Single Carrot Theatre, Fort Point Theatre Channel, The Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC Canberra), and The Baltimore Playwrights Festival (among many others). Ira has taught playwriting at Ohio University and served as a playwright mentor for Young Playwrights Festivals at Center Stage and Horizon Theater. He won a playwriting grant from Maryland State Arts Council in 2005 and an Emerging Playwright Award from The Chicago Union League in 2008. In 2006 City Paper voted Ira "Best Playwright of Baltimore" in their annual "Best of Baltimore" issue. iragamerman.weebly.com
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Leean Kim Torske is the first Korean/Norwegian-American playwright from the great state of Wyoming. Through the lenses of gender, mental illness, class, and race Leean tells stories about characters facing questions of identity. Her play The Problem with
Apples was 1st Runner Up in the 2008 Region VII KCACTF One Act Festival. Her play Three-Legged Dog won the previous year. In 2006 her ten minute play Sorting Baggage was a finalist in the UMBC INTEN 10 Minute Play Competition and Audience Choice Award winner in Shorts by Skirts. In 2008 she received a Meritorious Achievement Award in Directing from the KCACTF for her production of Steve Martin’s play WASP. Leean received her BA in English, BFA in Playwriting and Directing, and her MA in Literature from the University of Wyoming. She was the recipient of the 2010 Martha and Foster Harmon Fellowship in Theatre and the 2010 Evans Baker Scholarship.
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Second Years
Mark Chrisler, Jeremy Sony, Greg Aldrich, and Rebecca Abaffy (Photo by Hannah Van Brunt)
Rebecca Abaffy, born in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado raised in the Hocking Hills of Appalachia, is a half-Hungarian playwright. Much like her ancestors conquering the Carpathian Basin, she writes plays to tantalize Cuban cake-teers and rip clothes off would-be nurses. Abaffy graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University in 2007 with a degree in theater and creative writing. Her most recently completed play Bitch Magic, a full length play about West Virginia strippers, received readings at the annual Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights' Festival in Athens, Ohio and at Jimmy 43's in Manhattan, New York. She wrote her first full length play, If Picasso Had A Sister, as a creative honors thesis. After graduation Abaffy spent two years working for the Japanese government as an English teacher. Here she learned to bow properly while theatricalizing high school speech contests. This experience led to several more plays including Seahorse-Hehorse and Fancy Rags. Abaffy is currently working on her MFA in playwriting at Ohio University while writing her new play Wet Foot/Dry Foot, which takes place in a ‘49 Mercury car-boat operated by Cuban truck-o-nauts.
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Greg Aldrich is a Chicago based philosophical, poetic playwright whose spirit emerged from the icy, winter dark-nights- of-the-soul of the Alaskan desert. Award-winning plays include The Blue Hotel (Winner, City Lit Theater Company's Second Annual Art of Adaptation Festival) and In The Octopus's Garden (Audience Choice Award, Rhythm Section's MixTape 2010). He was also a Semi-Finalist for the Princess Grace in 2010 for his play Epulosia. Other plays include The Moment After, The Attack of the
Ladybugs, Typing Lear, The Body Snatcher, Looking Long Into the Abyss, The Principle of the Thing, and Is It Supposed to Bleed This Much. His plays have been developed and produced by such theatres as City Lit Theater Company, Dreamwell Theatre, Cyrano's Theatre Company, AstonRep Theatre Company, Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, The Englert Theatre, Third Base Players, Seward Follies Productions, nufan ensemble, The Rhythm Section, Vintage Theatre Collective, TBA Theatre, Three Wise Moose, and InnateVolutions Theater Productions. Greg received his BA in English from Benedictine College in Atchison, KS and has trained with Chicago Dramatists, Victory Gardens, Riverside Theatre and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is a proud Artistic Associate with Mortar Theatre Company.
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Mark Chrisler In the last five years, Mark Chrisler has had twelve original productions, including the critical sensations TEATIME AT GOLGOTHA, CHINESE WHISPERS and HISTORIES MINOR, leading Timeout to label him "Chicago's prolific fringe absurdist." His plays take inspiration from historical, scientific or literary ephemera, but quickly diverge into ridiculous or irreconcilable philosophical quandaries, earning him comparisons to Pinter, Wilde, Chekhov, Durang and Stoppard. Chrisler's plays have been produced in Chicago at or by Prop Thtr, Curious Theatre Branch, The Viaduct Theater, The Side Project, National Pastime Theater, Acme Artworks, The Magpies, Center Portion and Found Objects Theatre, for whom he currently serves as resident playwright. Some of these plays have gone on to show with Four Humours Theatre in New Orleans and Springboard Theatre in London. His fiction and monologues have been published or produced by Towers Literary Annual, The 2nd Hand, BBC Underguide, The Reconstruction Room, Caberet Mit Teeth, Full Moon Vaudeville, Ray's Tap, Little Brother, Three Story Animal and PRI's This American Life. In 2009 The Chicago Reader named Chrisler "Best Emerging Playwright," bandying about adjectives like "brilliant," "thrilling," "fantastical," "cunning," "whip-smart," "masterful," "funny, menacing, subversive, smart, unique and impossible to imagine anywhere but on a stage." His latest plays, THE ART OF PAINTING and DR. HUCKLEBERRY PERSIMMON EXPLAINS VERY LITTLE FOR YOU! opened in January 2011 in the 22th annual Rhinoceros Theatre festival, following a series of readings this past summer at Center Portion Arts Center and Ohio University's own Madness showings. For more information, visit his website.
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Jeremy Sony has been writing stories since the age of six, after a run-in with a large automobile derailed his plans of playing little league. These days, the Ohio native writes about the two constants he sees in the world: death and technology—how we stay connected and alive. Sony is a 2010 Heideman Award Finalist for his play Spin Cycle. His work has been seen at Penobscot Theatre, Theatre Daedalus, Curtain Players, The Last Frontier Theatre Conference, and Ohio University's 2011 Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights' Festival. Sony's plays include The Face of Contrition, Something Beautiful, The Death of Edward Fox, Do They Expedite There, Meeting God on a Tuesday Morning, and Fluttering Against the Pane. Other writing credits include a feature film adaptation of his play Separation Anxiety (Official Selection, Trail Dance Film Festival 2011), which is available on DVD at Glass City Films, and his award-winning essay Hard Stop, published by Outskirts Press under the pseudonym Jamie Rotham. He holds a bachelor's degree in Film & Television from the University of Notre Dame and is an associate member of the Dramatists Guild. Sony is co-founder and Artistic Director of Theatre Daedalus, a company devoted to new play development. Currently, Sony is pursuing his MFA in Playwriting at Ohio University under the mentorship of Charles Smith and Erik Ramsey. You can follow his latest projects at jeremysony.com.
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First Years
Bianca Sams, Jacob Juntunen, Anthony Ellison, and Chanel Glover (Photo by Hannah Van Brunt)
Anthony Ellison was born, raised and schooled in Muncie, IN. He earned a creative writing degree at Ball State and fled to Chicago to pursue comedy writing. That's exactly what he did, plus he found how fun and exciting it was to act and improvise. His home-base theater is Chemically Imbalanced Theater in Chicago, though he had productions at Second City's Skybox and Annoyance productions. Sketch credits include: Horse (Second City Skybox), Blind Stinkin' (Second City), Shitbrick Merlot (Annoyance Theater). His full length comedic plays are Texas Sheen (Chemically Imbalanced Theater), and Ring Around the Guillotine (Chemically Imbalanced Theater). He is incredibly honored to be at OU learning from/with the best. Thank you and g'night.
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Chanel Glover is originally from Houston, Texas, but most recently hails from Chicago, Illinois where she was a practicing attorney. She holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Florida A&M University and a J.D. from Tulane University Law School. Chanel’s nontraditional journey to the theatre has served to shape her perspective and identity as a playwright. As a renegade lawyer, Chanel seeks to change the system (insert criminal, juvenile, etc.) through art. She is ultimately curious in discovering how society and
culture intersect with community, family and more specifically, youth. Most recently, in
September of 2010, a local Fine Arts Guild held a staged reading of her full-length play,
Forgetting Uganda.
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Jacob Juntunen operates as a theatre artist, producer, scholar, and teacher. He was a Senior Network Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, and Playwright in Residence at Scrap Mettle SOUL, writing commissioned plays from interviews with Chicago's diverse Uptown residents. His play Under America received Lee Blessing and Tennessee Williams Scholarships, providing him creative residencies at the Timberlake Playwrights Colony and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Jacob's plays were produced at Stages Repertory Theatre, the Source Festival, the Vestige Group, Mortar Theatre, Chicago Dramatists, Caffeine Theatre, Infamous Commonwealth Theatre, and others. Dramaturgical credits include TUTA, New Leaf, Infamous Commonwealth, and Steep theatres. Additionally, as Mortar's founding managing director, Jacob guided it through two profitable seasons, including winning a Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) grant and spearheading the successful application for Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs' Storefront Theatre space. His internationally published scholarship centers on the politics of theatre's reception. A high school dropout, Jacob trained as a playwright with Edward Albee at the University of Houston and attended Clackamas Community College (A.A. 1996), Reed College (B.A. 1999) and Northwestern University (Ph.D. 2007); he now attends Ohio University seeking an M.F.A. in playwriting. He taught theatre history at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and writing at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago (SAIC). Further recognition includes a Faculty Fulbright Fellowship at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). More info at JacobJuntunen.com and RiposteToTheWorld.blogspot.com.
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Bianca Sams is an Actor/Writer/Producer based in New York City. She is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School, where she earned the distinction of being Tisch's first ever Triple Major (Acting, Dramatic Writing, Africana Studies). At NYU she studied acting through the Strasberg Film Institute and Royal Academy Dramatic Arts (RADA) London, England. Her writing mentors at NYU included Richard Wesley, Beth Turner, George Malko, John Guerre (Honors), Kenneth Lonergan (Honors) and Daniel Goldfarb. Since graduating her work has been seen at Karamu House, Cleveland Public Theater, Old Vic Theater London and Public Theater in New York. She has performed as an actor at Cleveland Public Theater, Florida Studio Theater, Old Vic London, Public Theater NY, and can be seen on film in Rent directed by Chris Columbus. She is a full member of the Old Vic New Voices Network New York under Artistic Director Kevin Spacey. She has produced several ten minute play festivals in New York and Los Angeles, and is moving into full length off broadway theater. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Playwrighting at Ohio University with Charles Smith. For more information go to www.biancasams.com or check out her food blog at www.fingerlickinkitchen.com
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