For a while, Matthew Myers worried that his play was dead.
The actor-playwright with a flair for stage comedy submitted a new script to Essential Theatre in 2012, but Peter Hardy, the company’s artistic director, admitted to having problems with it. “There were some parts they weren’t crazy about, but they talked about staging a reading of it,” Myers recalls. “I did some rewrites, but it didn’t get picked up as part of the play-reading series. I thought it was dead in the water, but then Peter called me and said ‘You won the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award!’ It was like getting a reprieve from the governor. The show is still alive!”
Myers’ comedy-romance Stray Dogs joins Katie Grant Shalin’s family dramedy Swimming With Jellyfish and Hardy’s own fantasy-drama Mysterious Connections to form the repertory lineup of Essential’s 15th festival of new plays. For the second year in a row, the Essential Theatre Play Festival solely showcases Georgia playwrights, which differs sharply from its origins.
“Ever since our first year in 1999, choosing the plays has been about finding a lineup that we were excited to present,” says Hardy. “In the earlier days, that meant giving Atlanta audiences their first chance to see major new works by established writers like Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson, Christopher Durang and Sam Shepard.” Essential not only produced shows of national importance overlooked by Atlanta’s playhouses, it used its annual award to recognize such homegrown talents as Lauren Gunderson, Topher Payne, Gabriel Jason Dean and Karen Wurl.
In 2012, the locals proved strong enough to anchor Essential’s festivals on their own. The same is true this year. Hardy speculates about why the pool of Georgia playwrights seems deeper now than when Essential began. “In the early days we’d receive 20 to 30 submissions from around the state, but that number has gradually grown to around 60, and the overall quality of submissions has generally risen. Is this because Georgia’s playwriting has improved, or is it more the result of our growing reputation attracting better writers? Perhaps some of both, I suspect. The work of groups like Working Title Playwrights has helped local playwrights up their game with support programs.”
Myers’ Stray Dogs sprang from a conversation with a fellow actor. “I was having drinks with Bethany Lind, and she was talking about how she always going to play young girls because of how she looks — she’s never going to play her real age,” Myers recalls. “Play ideas often come to me in dreams, and that night I dreamed I was sitting at my computer writing the show, and then I woke up.”
Myers says Stray Dogs depicts a man and a woman who aren’t what they appear to be, and who end up in a lot of trouble, including shocking violence. “I like it to be really funny, really romantic, and then there’s a sudden flash of violence,” Myers says. “People don’t always realize how close to violence they are. As I get older I’ll see situations and think, ‘That could’ve really gotten out of hand.’ ”
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KATIE GRANT SHALIN’S Swimming With Jellyfish, which was workshopped last year, is getting its first full professional staging. It concerns a suburban family: The kids are preparing to leave the nest, while their parents struggle to reconnect after a betrayal. Shalin says that while the details are not autobiographical, the play stems from her own perceptions of surburbia.
“My inspiration comes from my own life living in the suburbs, seeing how hard everybody works to maintain the appearance of perfect suburban bliss, but knowing it’s only a façade,” says Shalin. “I wanted to write the play that looks behind the perfectly coordinated Pottery Barn window treatment to see what was really going on.”
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FOR THE THIRD TIME in 15 seasons, Essential stages a Hardy play, following 2000’s A Lovely Undertow and 2010’s Sally and Glen at the Palace. Hardy says he doesn’t program his own work lightly, and explains that Mysterious Connections, which depicts two lonely women who find themselves strangely linked, has been a long time coming.
He wrote it more than 20 years ago, when it was chosen from among 1,000 submissions for development at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. It never received a full production, until now, however, and Hardy says, “I’ve spent the last 20 years working on getting ready to finally finish this play, and in building a theater company that can give it the kind of production it needs.”
Hardy likes to see his fellow Georgia playwrights take risks with their work, and wants Essential to encourage creative freedom. “For the contest, our writers need to be current residents of Georgia, but the plays don’t have to be set in Georgia or the South — or even on Earth for that matter.
“Playwrights today have far too many restrictions placed on them – ‘No more than six or even four) characters’; ‘Don’t require a lot of different locations,’ ” etc. We do everything we can to encourage writers to be bold and ambitious.”
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The 2013 Essential Theatre Play Festival. July 12-Aug. 11. Actor’s Express (King Plow Arts Center), 887 W. Marietta St. $18-$23. 866-811-4111. Note: The King Plow Arts parking lot is under construction. Alternate parking options HERE. Details, tickets HERE or at 1.866.811.4111.
