Rider University will present its inaugural Fall New Play Festival on Nov. 7 in the Spitz Studio Theater.
Curated by David Lee White, the festival will feature new works by area playwrights, performed as staged readings by Rider University students. After the readings, audience members will have the opportunity to provide constructive feedback to the playwrights. Admission is free.
The weekend of performances will begin with Jessica Bedford’s Reveille, directed by Will Steinberger. When one cadet smuggles a beautiful young woman into a military college in the South, he and his bunk-mates find themselves in deep trouble. Sneak her out? Hide her? And why has she come? What does she want? Sex, commitment, truth and family collide in this dark comedy about codes of honor and ties that bind.
Jessica Bedford is a Philadelphia-based theatre artist. Her play Blessed Are, directed by Adam Immerwahr, premiered at Passage Theatre in 2012. She was a finalist for the 2012 New York Stage and Film Founders’ Award and her play Reveille recently won the Sue Winge Playwriting Award from Villanova University.
Clare Drobot’s Inktrap, directed by Janet Quartarone, will be performed on Saturday. Meet Millie Hull, the only female tattooist working a needle in the 1940s Bowery. Millie’s hardscrabble existence is filled with nights of drilling hearts and dice on the skin of New York City, but she longs for something more. Caught between her husband’s boozing and gambling, and her ward’s dreams of entering the ink game, Millie thinks she may have found her ticket out in a photographer documenting life on the Bowery. Inktrap is an exploration of temptation, legacy and the treacherous price of living in your own skin.
Clare Drobot is a New York-based playwright and dramaturg whose plays include The Bakken Formations, Subprime and Ways of Seeing. Her short work has been seen in the Old Vic New Voices Out of Character Contest, Culture Project’s Women Center Stage (co-written with Chisa Hutchinson), 8 Minute Musicals at New York Musical Theatre Festival, New York Madness and the New Jersey One Minute Play Festival. She is the current resident dramaturg/producing associate at Premiere Stages at Kean University and a former literary associate for Passage Theatre in Trenton. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied creative writing and music composition.
The weekend will conclude with Ian August’s The Aisling, directed by Jillian Carucci. Set in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland in 1982, against the bloody backdrop of The Troubles, the Regan family have their own battles to fight. Fiona has been newly inducted into a militant branch of the Irish Republican Army by her handsome young beau; Colin, her twin brother, is led to bloody violence by a spirit who claims to be his dead mother; and Owen, their father, can barely keep his rage contained long enough to hold them all together. A grim family secret threatens to blow them all apart, while pushing them deeper into the darkness of war. The Aisling is a riveting drama about the dualities of fantasy and reality, sanity and madness, light and dark, and one family’s struggle to survive.
Ian August is the internationally produced playwright of Missing Celia Rose, Natural History, Submitted by C. Randall McCloskey, The Aisling, Donna Orbits the Moon, The Goldilocks Zone, The Moor’s Son, Interviewese and Here and Us. He is currently writing a new drama, You’ll Never Know, and a novel, And With Gills. Mr. August is a founding member of the Passage Theatre Playwrights Lab and a new member of Philadelphia’s playwriting collective, The Foundry.
David Lee White is the current associate artistic director of community programming for Passage Theatre in Trenton. Prior to working for Passage, he was assistant artistic director and director of outreach for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival in Pittsburgh. In addition to his work with the Festival, Mr. White founded Chance Theatre, a theatre company committed to creating new dramatic works about AIDS. He subsequently moved to Chicago where he worked as an actor with Northlight Theatre, Bailiwick Repertory and Light Opera Works, among others. He was also a member of two Jeff Award-winning ensembles for his work in Next Theatre’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been… and The Incident. His play White Baby received its first production on the Passage stage and has since gone on to productions at Emerging Artists Theatre in New York as well as Combustible Theatre in Philadelphia. His play Blood: A Comedy was created as part of Passage’s Play Lab and was produced by Passage in November of 2009 with June Ballinger in the role of Jacqueline Stanzi. White also created, with June Ballinger, the show Trenton Lights, which told the true stories of Trenton residents as part of Passage’s mainstage season in 2010.
Rider University’s Theatre program has a rich tradition of preparing students for successful careers in all aspects of the theatre. Graduates of the program are working with national theatre companies, in film and on television. Campus productions have earned critical praise for more than 50 years and offer the community the opportunity to see aspiring actors in the early stages of their careers.
Rider University is located at 2038 Lawrenceville Road in Lawrenceville. For more information, visit rider.edu/arts.
