Artist Updates: A Tidal Wave of Awesome

This summer, I reached out to past Freedom Art Retreat participants with the following prompt:

“Tell me one awesome thing you’ve recently done, or about to do.”

The responses are overwhelming in their variety, and I’m excited to share them with you…

Meron Langsner: Three playwriting things: Over Here will be in the NY Fringe Festival, The Devil’s Own Game will have a workshop reading with Turn To Flesh Productions in NYC, and Legacies is being developed through One Bird Productions. (As an aside, fellow Retreatant Angel Veza is likely to be involved in Legacies). I also recently had my play, Bystander 9/11 included in a major documentary theatre anthology published by Bloomsbury.

Lia Romeo: My play Reality won the HotCity Theatre New Play Contest last summer, and I am looking forward to the world premiere in St Louis this fall!

Nina Louise Morrison: I’m a new member of Project: Project and Accomplice Writers Group, and I was a 2014 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Semi-Finalist.  I’ll be writing for The Mad Dash on July 12th.

Emily Kaye Lazzaro: I had a small role in Olive Kitteridge, which will air on HBO some time this year. Also I’m in Boston Public Works and we will be producing my new play Three next spring. Just finished the first draft and it’s coming together really nicely!

Corianna Moffatt: I devised and completed an oral history project, called The Impossible Questions Tour, spanning eleven states and gathered over 50 interviews about people’s personal philosophies on life, love, and loss.

Phil Berman: I’m running a Kickstarter to record my first album!! The album features songwriting from the last five years, many of them performed/tinkered at Freedom Art, fully orchestrated by Somerville guitarist/producer Brendan Burns.

Steve Bogart: Devised two theater pieces, Interference, and Lunar labyrinth with Retreat alums John King, Phil Berman, April Ranger, and Corianna Moffatt, that performed at the Oberon.

Amanda Coffin: This past year I served as the Artistic Intern at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, MD, did some great new-play dramaturgy/directing work with the DC based company Field Trip Theatre, and served as Dramaturg for the Plimoth Players, the Shakespeare Theatre Troupe at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, MA.  In the fall I’ll be attending Villanova University to receive my MA in Theatre.

Jason Weber: I recently completed phase one of an ongoing practice-based research project in collaboration with a post-doc researcher at Yale (Mary Isbell) where we worked with students to explore the theatre rehearsal process aboard 19th century warships. We performed phase one aboard U.S.S. Constitution for an audience of museum staff and historians and are currently looking at phase two which will involve an expanded script for a public metatheatrical presentation.

Allie Herryman: I’m the managing director at Open Hand Theater. That’s amazing enough considering where I was at retreat.
But just for fun I’ll add that I also got to invent and propose to the staff some new programming for the theater for the fall, and everything I made up was accepted for implementation (!!!)

Colleen Hughes: My play Directive 47 will have a staged reading as part of Fresh Ink Theatre’s Ink Spots reading series this fall.

Barbara Whitney: Just finished up my first year as chair of the theatre dept at cambridge school of weston! Maybe now I’ll get to some of them other projects.

Peter Staley: Just wrapped up my role as Producer and Actor in the world premiere of The Brink of Us, by Delaney Britt Brewer, in Brooklyn this past spring, supported in part by the fantastic New Georges, an Off Off Broadway company specializing in new works by female playwrights with female directors.

April Ranger: Just had two poems published in a rad anthology called Courage: Daring Poems For Gutsy Girls, and I am currently booking myself a Northwest Poetry Tour for the fall!

Lenelle Moïse: As some of you already know, my book, Haiti Glass, is here. I’ve been touring the U.S. and Canada sharing selections, live. Enjoy the book trailer!

Basil Considine: My comic opera The Frat Party is appearing in the 2014 Minnesota Fringe Festival, mixing a team of Boston-area opera professionals with local talent.

Amy Brooks: In July, I will return to West Virginia to serve as the Humanities Director for the Contemporary American Theater Festival. 

Rosa Nagle: I’m self-producing my play October in October, 2015, at the Broadmoor Sanctuary in Natick, MA, with help from the Massachusetts Audubon Society. 

Keith Trickett: I am once again acting this summer as Lancaster in Theatre@First’s production of Henry IV.  

Alison Ruth: This fall I’m moving to Iowa City to start an MFA in dramaturgy at the University of Iowa!

Morgan Goldstein: I recently worked as the dramaturg for a year-long development project Sean Graney’s play All Our Tragic through the Radcliffe Institute, and as the dramaturg and line producer for a reading of Sextet by Tommy Smith.

 

Meet the Retreatant: Amy Brooks

Amy Brooks is a dramaturg, actor, journalist, and teacher from the wild and wonderful state of West Virginia. She received a BFA in Acting from West Virginia University and is currently an MFA Dramaturgy teaching assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a co-founder and Graduate Producer of the UMass New Play Lab. Her devised theater credits at UMass include a collaborative collage of autobiographical poems entitled Seven, and No Filter/With or Without You, a dance/monologue/spoken word examination of social media’s impact on undergraduate identity. Prior to her journey East, Amy lived and worked as a writer, production dramaturg, and actor in Dayton, Ohio. She was a core company member of the SEED Theatre Project, where she co-directed and dramaturged Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree, as well as company dramaturg and performer with the Free Shakespeare! troupe. Amy’s theater criticism and arts features were published for two years in Impact Weekly (now the Dayton City Paper); she also read scripts for FutureFest, Dayton’s international new play festival, and served as a performance mentor for young actors at Town Hall Theatre and W. Shakespeare & Co.

Meet the Retreatant: Alison Ruth

Alison Ruth is proud to be a member of the Freedom Art family! Originally from Boston, she has been working as a dramaturg around Philadelphia for the past two years. She is currently the production dramaturg at Delaware Shakespeare Festival. In the fall of 2014, she will be moving to Iowa City to start an MFA in dramaturgy at the University of Iowa. 

Meet the Retreatant: Rosa Nagle

Rosa Nagle is a poet and a playwright. She graduated the University of Massachusetts at Boston with a BA in English. Her first book of poetry, “From Zephyr’s Ankles” was published in 2009. Her poems have appeared in “The Iconoclast,” “Crucible”,  and “The Artistic Muse,” magazines. Five of her poems were included in the 2010 anthology of women’s poetry “Postcards From Eve.” She was the featured reader at Stone Soup poetry series in 2013. Her play “On The Death Of June” had a staged reading at the Performing Arts Center of Metrowest, and was also a finalist in the Two Paths Productions Summer Festival, 2014. Rosa is self-producing her play “October” in October, 2015, at the Broadmoor Sanctuary in Natick, MA, with help from the Massachusetts Audubon Society. She continues to participate in workshops at Grubb Street.

Meet the Retreatant: Keith Trickett

Keith Trickett is a jack of most theatrical trades. He juggles interests in dramaturgy, directing, acting, and stage managing, and is always willing to try something once. His recent credits include Love Labour’s Lost in which he played Don Armado and produced a dramaturgy-heavy program, and stage managing for the Theater Offensive with 99% Stone (a staged reading of a new musical based on the events of the Stonewall Riots and their effects then and now) and Liars & Believers Icarus presented at Oberon. He will once again be acting as Lancaster in Theatre@First’s production of Henry IV.

Meet the Retreatant: Morgan Goldstein

Morgan C. Goldstein is a graduate of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. At the A.R.T. she served as the dramaturg for “The Tempest” and the co-dramaturg for “The Lily’s Revenge” and “American Sojourns: Three Short Plays by Thornton Wilder,” a project with ART first-year actors performed in at the Moscow Art Theater in Moscow, Russia. Additionally, Morgan worked as the dramaturg for a year-long development project Sean Graney’s play “All Our Tragic” through the Radcliffe Institute and as the dramaturg and line producer for a reading of “Sextet” by Tommy Smith. She has worked on projects with the Kitchen Theater in Ithaca, NY, the League of Professional Theatre Women in New York City, and Sacramento Music Circus in Sacramento, CA. Morgan graduated magna cum laude from Ithaca College. Her interests lie in new play development, political docudrama, and authorial voice in adaptation.

Meet the Retreatant: Basil Considine

Basil Considine is a composer-playwright, conductor and musicologist. A native of the Boston area, Basil is currently a resident of Minnesota’s Twin Cities area. His work for the stage and church take him across the United States, and musicological pursuits regularly see him straddling both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He lived in Mauritius from 2011-2012 to conduct ethnographic research for his doctoral dissertation, Priests, Pirates, Opera Singers, and Slaves: Séga and European Art Music in Mauritius, the Little Paris of the Indian Ocean. He has conducted ethnographic field research on music in Hawaii and Mauritius. Basil has been the Artistic Director of The Really Spicy Opera Company (formerly the Reduced Spice Opera Company of Brookline) since 2006.

 

Meet the Retreatant: Angel Veza

Angel Veza was recently one of two Fight Directors working on Supergravity and the Eleventh Dimension at Vagabond Theatre. In addition to being a fight director, Angel is also an actor whose recent credits include: When the Gods Speak (Bostonia Bohemia/Interim Writers), A Dream Play (Heart and Dagger Productions), and Stoops! (Divine Stage Works). She recently served as the Fight Director for From Denmark With Love (Vaquero Playground). Angel graduated from Tufts University and has also trained at the Vampire Cowboys Rabid Vamps Fight Studio in NYC.

Meet the Retreatant: Bill Doncaster

Bill Doncaster is a playwright, producer, and the co-founder and President of Stickball Productions. His adaptation of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle was Stickball’s inaugural production, ran for 11 performances, and was re-mounted as part of the Emerging America Festival.  His short plays have been produced in Boston, New York, Chicago, Louisiana, Florida.  He earned a BFA at Emerson College, MFA at Lesley University.  He’s currently serving on the Board of Directors for the Small Theater Alliance of Boston.

Countdown: 3 days!

As we edge ever closer to this year’s Retreat, we’re looking back at the wrap-up reports from last year. Check out these write ups from 2011 retreatants — click their names for links to full posts:

• Nina Louise Morrison

“I am always returning to the question – why this right now? – as I sit and write, alone. I do this because I want the plays I write to mean something, not only to me, but to be worthy of other people’s blood, sweat and tears.  A play asks for the time, attention, spirit, and money of so many people.  So, whether my play is intended to make an audience cry, think, sigh or laugh, I take my job pretty seriously.  Probably, often, too seriously.”

• Meron Langsner

“About ten days ago I returned to Boston from one of my best creative and collaborative experiences in a long time.  I am a person who really enjoys what I do, so these are strong words. …The whole week was one constant shifting experience of creative synergy.  Every collaborator I had the pleasure of working with was incredibly smart, giving, and creative and in every group the sum was always greater than the whole of the parts.  This sounds a little cheesy, but everyone made everyone else a better artist.”

• Colleen Hughes

“I learned a lot about my own process, and I learned that I love collaborative projects even more than I’d realized before the retreat. I love working with other people and getting to create something even better than I could have made on my own. I went into grad school not knowing anyone else who wrote plays. After I finished school, I knew a nice group of amazing writers, but I didn’t know many other theatre artists working in different disciplines. I now have a group that consists of not only writers but dramaturgs, sound designers, puppet designers, and fight directors who I feel I could call on when a project needed it. It made me want to work collaboratively so much more often.”