The essentials for The Essential Theatre Festival
The Essential Theatre Festival kicks off today with three (Mysterious Connections, Stray Dogs, and Swimming with Jellyfish) original and homegrown shows from our lovely and complicated state of Georgia. The shows will be running from today till August 11, and below is all the beginning tips to getting started on your viewership. Peter Hardy, the artistic director of The Essential Theatre, talks about how you can easily see all of the shows, why it’s important to showcase playwrights, and how you can get involved in upcoming years.
*Keep checking back for interviews with the playwrights!
Q. The Essential Theatre Festival is completely dedicated to showcasing work by Georgia playwrights. Why was it so important to focus solely on Georgia writers?
A. Since the annual Festival began in 1999, we’ve been committed to producing at least one new play by a Georgia playwright, the winner of our annual Essential Theatre Playwriting Award competition (the only one of its kind, exclusively dedicated to the work of Georgia playwrights and giving the winner both a cash prize and a full production). For years the other plays we produced were usually ones from other parts of the country that hadn’t been produced in this area before. What we’ve always been about is producing theatre that we find stimulating and challenging and is new – both for our own satisfaction and for the sake of enriching the theatre-going experience of our audiences. In recent years we’ve been getting more and more strong submissions from local writers and so we’ve been concentrating on them, to support the work of local writers and because we feel it’s important to give Georgia its own voice on the stage – to let Georgia speak for itself. Without strong new plays, theatre cannot grow and move forward. I’m a playwright myself and I want the Essential Theatre to provide the kind of opportunities and positive experiences that I myself would like to find at theatres. We don’t follow any agenda except excellence – we accept plays of any style and about any subject matter. They have to be written by current residents of Georgia, but they don’t have to be ABOUT Georgia, or be set in the South, or even on Earth. We’d like to encourage local writers to be as bold and ambitious as they can be.
Q. What is the selection process like when deciding on what shows will be chosen each year? And how can playwrights submit work for possible inclusion for upcoming festivals?
A. Our annual submission deadline is April 23 (Shakespeare’s birthday) and by our most recent deadline we received around 60 submissions (the most we’ve ever gotten). The winning play that is chosen will be produced in the summer of 2014, and perhaps some others from that group will be as well. Anyone interested in submitting can find details and guidelines at www.EssentialTheatre.com. The plays are read by a number of people, with a few finally being chosen for final consideration. For the contest winner we always try to choose, simply, the one we think was the best. In choosing other plays for our annual three-play Festival, we consider what will make for a strong, balance and varied Festival.
Q. This year three plays will be shown between July 12 – August 11 at Actors Express. For audiences, are there package deals for tickets to see all the plays?
A. Yes, you can go to www.EssentialTheatre.com and find out about our FlexPass program – it’s the best, cheapest and most convenient way to see as many of our productions as you want.
Q. The plays this year are driven by unique characters and relationships. Is there ever a theme for the festival that drives the selection?
A. We never consciously set out to have a “theme” for the Festival, although sometimes one seems to emerge. As I said, we try to put as few restrictions on our writers as possible, and we simply look for strong and interesting plays, with some variety in the Festival. We try to never have two shows with the same “feel” in one Festival.
Q. One of the plays that was chosen, Stray Dogs, was the winner of the 2013 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award. For a theatre company, there seems to be a lot of focus and accolade attached to the writing side of theatre, something you really don’t see that often. Did being a playwright yourself lead you to understand the importance of a good script?
A. Definitely. I’ve won a few national playwriting honors myself (from the Festival of Southern Theatre and the New Southern Theatre Festival) and the play of mine that we’re producing this summer, MYSTERIOUS CONNECTIONS, was chosen to be workshopped at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference – it was one of ten plays chosen from over 1,000 submissions, and going there was a great honor and a wonderful experience. August Wilson was there that summer, living down the hall from me in the playwrights’ dormitory. And I’ve had around twenty of my plays produced around the country, and so it’s important to me that the playwrights that Essential Theatre produces have a positive, nurturing and stimulating experience. The many glowing testimonials we’ve received from those writers indicate that we’ve mostly been successful in this.
