The Cutting Ball Variety Pack
The Playwrights
Series
How do you turn words into characters? What do playwrights learn from actors? Watch words come to life.
The Playwrights Series is an incubator for experimental new works. Two unproduced and unpublished plays, selected from a pool of 150 script submissions, are presented in staged readings after a week-long developmental process to refine authorial vision and further craft these in-progress scripts. These two plays may be wildly different from one another but both push theatrical expectations and conventions in form and content. The Playwrights Series reflects Cutting Ball's commitment to the new experimental canon and the emerging artists who will shape it.
THUNDERBODIES
With the war finally over, Grotilde - a once gargantuan, ceaselessly desirable woman - and General Itterod decide to wed. But, with the knowledge that every marriage ends in heartbreak, the two decide to jump right to the main event and plan an extravagant, celebratory divorce instead. In her new comedy, THUNDERBODIES, playwright Kate Tarker constructs a muscular and unrelenting war-torn world with an absurd language all its own.
by Kate Tarker
Monday, February 5 at 7pm
Tuesday, February 6 at 7 pm
Kate Tarker's (playwright) plays include THUNDERBODIES, God is Dead Let’s Make Love, and Laura and the Sea. Her works have been developed at The Lark, The Vineyard, The Wilma, Ars Nova, NYTW, Playwrights’ Center, and The O’Neill, among others. Honors include a Jerome Fellowship, The Vineyard’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, The National Science Playwriting Award, Theater Masters’ Visionary Playwright Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a PWCenter/NET Ensemble Collaboration Grant. Kate has had two of her plays on the Kilroys List. MFA: Yale.
Eric Brown
Michail Itterod
Matthew Capbarat
Boy (Son Swan)
Amanda Farbstein
Girl
Katja Rivera
President
Stacy Ross
Grotilde Nancy Swan
Complex (KOM-pleks)
Katie isn’t a genius but Max – the guy she's been "casually" hooking up with – just might be. Maybe it's because he's a boy? Alexa Derman, a young woman in the arts, writes intimately and incisively about what it's like to be a young woman in the arts. Complex (KOM-pleks) is a taut and funny-scary play about the gender politics of brilliance and how to survive as a “bright and promising” teenager who feels anything but.
by Alexa Derman
Monday, February 12 at 7pm
Tuesday, February 13 at 7 pm
Alexa Derman (playwright) writes about young women. Production and developmental history includes Crashbox, Fresh Ink, EST/LA, the Yale Playwrights Festival, Young Playwrights Inc., The Blank, and others. O'Neill NPC: Semifinalist, 2017 and 2015; Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Award: Honorable Mention, 2017; Echo National Young Playwrights Residency: Finalist; Downstage Left Residency: Semifinalist. Her current work-in-progress is about love and longing in 1970s Hollywood and outer space. BA-in-progress: Yale.
Gianna DiGregorio
Olivia
Adam Magill
Max
Jed Parsario
Andrew
Adrienne Walters
Katie
The Playwright Series is made possible in part by Suzanne Johnson Schlenger.