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: 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: 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: 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.

Meet the Retreatant: Lenelle Moïse

Lenelle Moïse creates jazz-infused, rhythmic performance texts about Haitian-American identity and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, memory and magic. Her two-act comedy, Merit, won the 2012 Ruby Prize for women of color playwrights. She also wrote, composed and co-starred in the critically-acclaimed drama, Expatriate, which launched Off-Broadway at the Culture Project. Moïse was the fifth Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, the 2012 Visiting Performing Artist in African & African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin, the 2011 Artist in Residence in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a 2010 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival Fellow. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College (2004). Her work has been published in several anthologies including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution.

Check out Lenelle’s website, which is packed with awesome content., and watch some of her work, HERE.

Meet the Retreatant: April Ranger

April Ranger is a poet and a playwright. While pursuing a B.A. in Theatre from Emerson College she discovered the weekly open mic and poetry slam at the Cantab Lounge and began writing poems for performance. April was selected three times to perform as a member of Boston Cantab’s National Poetry Slam Team and twice as their Individual Representative. She has completed multiple short-leg national tours with fellow poet Carrie Rudzinski, and has performed her poems at venues ranging from The Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan to a warehouse in Detroit to an art gallery in Roslyn, Washington. Her poems have appeared in Off The Coast and Muzzle.
Her ten-minute play Frabjous Day premiered at the Boston Theatre Marathon in 2008 and was later produced by Caffeine Theatre in Chicago. Those Still Living, produced at the 2011 Boston Theatre Marathon, was originally conceived while studying at the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. In 2010, Whistler in the Dark theatre company adapted a selection of her poems into a theatrical piece entitled The Last Flame Left. April recently returned to Boston from a four-month sojourn to her roots in Maine to complete a full-length play, The Mouth of Jordan. She loves to ride her bicycle through all the various neighborhoods and nature spots in Boston.

Check out her mad skillz, right HERE.

Meet the Retreatant: Lia Romeo

Lia Romeo is a playwright, novelist, and humor book author. She earned her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.F.A in playwriting from Rutgers, ending up with staggering quantities of student loans and no marketable skills whatsoever. She managed to secure a part-time job writing standardized test questions, and spends the rest of her time writing plays and novels and daydreaming about pretty shoes. Her play Hungry premiered at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City in the 2011-2012 season, and was produced by Stillwater Theater subsequently. Her play Green Whales premiered at the Unicorn Theatre in 2010, and was produced by Renegade Theatre Experiment in 2012. Her play Right Place, Right Time premiered at Renegade Theatre Experiment in 2010, and was produced by Stillwater Theatre subsequently. Her play LoveSick was produced by Project Y Theatre Company at 59E59 in New York in 2012. Her plays have also been developed at the Kennedy Center, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, New Jersey Repertory Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre, HotCity Theatre, Abingdon Theatre, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, PlayPenn, WordBridge, and the Heideman Award. She was the 2008-2009 National New Play Network Emerging Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey. Her humor book, 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, was published in 2009 by Abrams Image. It is currently in its second printing, with over 30,000 copies sold, and has earned favorable reviews in the Boston Globe and other national publications. Her first novel, Dating the Devil, will be published by BelleBooks in 2013, and is in development as a TV movie with Vast Entertainment. She is currently at work on a commission from HotCity Theatre in St. Louis.

Check out her Things to Be Miserable About blog and twitter feed!

Meet the Retreatant: John J King

John J King is part Texan and part Tyrannosaur.

He lives in Boston where he makes plays, art, music, and scares little children who thought dinosaurs were dead.

He has a Bachelor of Arts from SUNY Boondocks and an accent from his mama.

Goals include recording a great dance tune, making impossible things from cardboard, and singing in a girl group.

Artistic Mission: to incite in all people wonder and delight at the world.

Meet the Retreatant: Steven Bogart

Steven Bogart is a playwright, director, teacher and visual artist.

He has worked with the likes of Neil Gaiman, James Carroll, Kate Snodgrass and Amanda Palmer. He directed Cabaret at the American Repertory Theater in 2010 and will devise a new piece for the A.R.T. Institute in 2013. He is an Artist-in-Residence at Southern New Hampshire University, adjunct acting professor at Emerson College, and the University of New Orleans. His plays have performed in Boston, NYC, and Chicago. He leads workshops in collaborative playwriting around the state of Massachusetts and has created over 50 workshop theater pieces. In a previous life, He was a high school drama teacher for too many years to mention. He left Lexington High School last year to live more directly as a free-lance artist. He lives with his wife Amory in Maynard, Massachusetts.

Find him on twitter: @StevenBogart