Synchronicity Theatre’s third SheWrites New Play Festival runs Feb. 12-24 and culminates in free public readings of three unproduced plays by female playwrights.
The playwrights are Atlanta-based Daryl Lisa Fazio, San Diego’s Kimberly Monks and New York-based Kathryn Walat. The project, previously done in 2006 and 2010, is held in association with the Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis and Atlanta’s Working Title Playwrights. Tickets to the readings are free but must be reserved HERE or by calling 404.484.8636.
SheWRITES gives the winning playwrights 10 days to investigate, tweak, prod and polish their plays, with the help of a director, a dramaturg, a stage manager and a cast of the best Atlanta actors available. The goal is for each playwright is to have time to do the work she feels her play needs.
More on the playwrights and their plays:
MEDICA by Lisa Daryl Fazio | Public reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 21. In a remote surgical tent during a 25-year war, in a time later than now and in a world where all healers are women, 60-year old Dr. Minnie Vega is about to snap. Then the gifted, young Dr. Irene Wilde joins her, along with soldiers involved in a sudden offensive. For the next 24 hours, the doctors butt heads and fix the wounded, who all look the same. Radios breathe and defy space and time. Light comes out of fingers. The doctors only want to know this: Is it possible to care for yourself while you’re busy healing everyone else? Synchronicity artistic director Rachel May directs.
In addition to being a playwright, Fazio is an actor and theater graphic designer. Her comedy The Flower Room, about an uptight academic who turns to erotica to make a living, gets its world premiere in April at Actor’s Express. Split in Three (2016), a drama with humor about a mixed-race family, had its world premiere at Aurora Theatre and Florida Rep; Horizon Theatre commissioned and staged the world premiere of her comedy Freed Spirits (also 2016), about souls human and spectral in Atlanta’s Oakwood Cemetery. Fazio, a member of the Dramatists Guild, has a B.A. in theater from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in graphic design from the University of Memphis. As a Mississippi native, she says she’s committed to writing complex, challenging roles for women of all ages, races and classes, often with a focus on the Deep South.
ROMEO & NAOMI RAMIREZ by Kathryn Walat | Public reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22. She’s a rookie cop on her first undercover narcotics assignment. He’s an honors English student trying to live up to his Shakespearean name. And this is Florida, with some of the toughest drug laws in the nation. So is it a love story, or a tragedy? Who should you believe? Synchronicity managing director Lee Nowell, also a playwright, directs.
Walat, who once lived in Savannah, now lives in New York and teaches playwriting at the State University of New York/Albany. She’s a core member of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, an affiliated artist at New Georges in New York City and writes librettos for operas. Her play Creation (Theatre @ Boston Court, Pasadena, Calif.) — about music, obsession and the creative process — earned an LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award nomination. Her Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen — about overcoming odds — premiered off-Broadway at the Women’s Project and was published in New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2007. Bleeding Kansas (Hangar Theatre, Ithaca, N.Y.) — set in the Wild West as a divided nation moves toward the Civil War — earned a Francesca Primus Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association. Walat has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama.
HANDS OF COLOR by Kimberly Monks | Public reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 24. The story follows Thomas, a white man, who has slowly had his racist views stripped from him by people he encounters in the African-American community. The plays asks if love and hate can thrive side-by-side? If innocence and love can cure racism? And if redemption is at all possible for those we deem irredeemable? Lydia Fort, who teaches at Emory University, directs.
Monks is a third-year M.F.A. acting candidate and emerging playwright at the University of California/ San Diego. She has worked at the Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis) and the La Jolla Playhouse (California). She’s committed, she says, to giving a voice to the marginalized and the silenced by telling stories that must be told.
