JAW: A Playwrights Festival
Special programs
Community artist labs
July 24 — 26
here is room for 15 participants in each lab. To submit your name for the random lottery, please email your complete contact information to kelseyt@pcs.org by July 10th and specify which lab/s you are submitting for. Lottery drawing for participation is on July 13.
Creativity and collaboration:
Or, when is constructive criticism actually creative?
Joy Meads
Friday, July 24, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Tony Kushner ends the published edition of Angels in America with an ode to his collaborators, asserting that “the fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that artistic accomplishment is exclusively the provenance of individual talents, is politically charged and, in my case at least, repudiated by the facts.” In a speech to ART/NY, playwright Richard Nelson presented a strong dissenting opinion, claiming that “the role of the playwright in today’s American theater is … under serious attack” from “a culture of ‘help’ [that] breeds a culture of dependence.” Beginning with a discussion of the evolving and at times controversial role of the dramaturg in contemporary American theatre, we’ll explore the dynamics of creative relationships. How are positive collaborations built? How can one give feedback in a manner that’s useful to the artist? How can writers remain open to input without betraying their artistic impulses?
Joy Meads is the Literary Manager at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Prior to Steppenwolf, Joy served as the Associate Artistic Director of California Shakespeare Theater, where, as director of the theatre’s New Works/New Communities program, she oversaw multi-year community-based processes of new play creation with such writers as Naomi Iizuka, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and Octavio Solis. Through NW/NC, she also established ongoing artist residencies with a number of community based organizations, including the Write to Read program at the Alameda County Juvenile Hall, Guerrero House (an organization serving homeless youth in San Francisco), and Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center. As a company member of Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, Joy directed the West Coast Premiere of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Say You Love Satan, among others. Since her move to Chicago, Joy has directed and dramaturged new work at Chicago Dramatists, Pavement Group, Knox College, and Northwestern University. Joy attended New York University, where she majored in Dramatic Literature and Theatre History.
Jumpstarting your writer's mind
Naomi Iizuka
Sunday, July 26, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
This writing lab will focus on skills to spark inspiration and get out of your own way when you’re writing. You will begin something new in the workshop, generate new ideas for future writing projects, and leave with some strategies for how to get focused and inspired to write when time is short and life is hectic.
Naomi Iizuka’s plays include 36 Views, Anon(ymous), At the Vanishing Point, Polaroid Stories, Language of Angels, Tattoo Girl, and Skin. Her plays have been produced by the Goodman Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, the Children’s Theater Company, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the Huntington Theater, Berkeley Rep, GeVa, Portland Center Stage, the Public Theatre, Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts, the Dallas Theatre Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Next Wave Festival”, Soho Rep, and the Edinburgh Festival, and workshopped at Sundance Theatre Lab, Midwest PlayLabs, the Public Theater’s New Works Now, PS 122, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Seattle Rep. Her plays have been published by TCG, Smith and Kraus, Heineman, Playscripts, Theatre Forum, and American Theater. Her play Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West will premiere at Berkeley Rep in Spring 2010. She is currently working on commissions from Cornerstone Theatre, the Huntington Theater, Yale Rep, and the La Jolla Playhouse. Naomi is a member of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, a Joyce Foundation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, an NEA/TCG Artist in Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a PEN Center USA West Award for
