Meet Our 2018 Playwright Fellows

We are excited to have the opportunity to engage with these eight playwrights in an effort to create a unique body of work. The goal of this program is to collaboratively write eight individual plays that can also be produced as a cohesive play cycle. We have selected writers from various geographical regions, from New Hampshire to California and Canada. They encompass a wealth of experiences and knowledge. And collectively they are our 2018 Playwright Fellows.

Alex Karolyi

Alex Karolyi founded Shadowpath, a charitable theatre company in 2002 as a professional outlet for local performers in York Region, Ontario, Canada. She developed the site-specific theatre series; Plays in Cafes, Readings In Wineries and Hotel Solstice, transforming everyday spaces into creative places. She develops and delivers workshops for youth and seniors and is training the next generation of female creative leaders with a paid apprenticeship program. Shadowpath is the recipient of Newmarket’s Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Award for Innovation and Richmond Hill’s Creativity Symposium Award for Best Innovation for their Cafe Cruise project. Shadowpath has been nominated for Not-For-Profit of the Year by Vaughan’s Chamber of Commerce and Artistic Director, Alex Karolyi recently received a Leading Women Leading Girls Award from MPP Chris Ballard recognizing her work to advance female leadership in Canadian Theatre.

Alex began as an actor training at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, York University and the Randolph Academy for Performing Arts in Toronto. Shadowpath, allowed Alex to developed into a theatre producer and playwright gaining her the position of General Manager with Resurgence Theatre Company in 2007 and as the Programming Coordinator of the York Region Festival Alliance in 2015 - 2016. Her own plays have been produced in Toronto, Vancouver, and the UK. She has traveled as a global artist to Hungary, Scotland, Paris, Vienna, Italy, Panama City and Prince Edward Island.

Hortense Gerardo is a writer and anthropologist. Her full-length play, The Token Fallopians Of Middleton Heights was selected for Fresh Ink Theatre’s 2017- 2018 Ink Spot staged reading series. Other recently featured works include: Virtuous Reality (Boston Theater Marathon XX) Anne Get Your Firearm (46th Annual Playwrights’ Platform Festival), The Song Of Odd (MBL Club), Shadow|Proof House (Nuit Blanche Toronto), Brand Of The Free Clone Of The Brave (Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston), Model Behavior and The Last Glance (La Mama E.T.C.), Weekend In St. Moritz (Great Plains Theatre Conference). Her site-informed durational action artwork The Glass Heart Solos will be featured in Nuit Blanche Toronto 2018. Her award-winning feature-length screenplays include Fourhand and Dancing In Exile. She is a Company One Theatre Playlab Unit Playwright (2018 cohort).

Current projects include a focus on issues of power, identity, the interface between technological change and its ethical implications, as well as multimedia experimentation in narrative form. She is a member of The Dramatists’ Guild of America, The International Center for Women Playwrights, the American Anthropological Association, and Director of the non-profit organization, in vivo Productions. For more info go to: www.hortensegerardo.com

Hortense Gerardo

Raymond McAnally

Raymond McAnally is an award-winning actor, produced playwright, and screenwriter. As a playwright, Raymond’s full-length solo-play, Size Matters, received it’s world premiere at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati in May 2014, as the final show in the theatre’s twenty-seventh season. Directed by Tony Award-winning former Cincinnati Playhouse Artistic Director Ed Stern, the show ran for three weeks; garnering outstanding reviews, standing ovations, and sold out performances. The show was filmed before a live audience in 2015 and is now a comedy special available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Other playwriting credits include two short plays, The Odd Ball and Homeland, which have been produced at festivals on both coasts. From 2010 to 2014, Raymond was the head content writer for the online production company Daily Fiber Films, which produced and distributed over sixty online comedy shorts written by Raymond. Numerous shorts were features by FunnyOrDie.com, Fullscreen, CNN, New Media Rockstars, and The Food Network. In 2017, Raymond’s independent pilot “DPW” was filmed on location in Tupelo, Mississippi. Raymond holds an MFA in Acting from Rutgers University and a BA in Philosophy from Sewanee: The University of the South.

Jeanne Beckwith is a published and practicing playwright who has worked in theater as a director, actor, stage manager, etc. for her entire adult life, but playwriting has always been her main focus and passion. Her play, A War Story at the Rialto, is published by Playscripts, Inc., and she has had short plays included in several collections.

Over the years, Jeanne has had her work done from San Francisco to Istanbul. This past November, her full-length play, The Late Rosie Callaghan, was read in the NEWvember New Plays Reading Festival in Dublin, Ireland. A short play, Happy Trails, was produced in late January, 2018 by Lucky Penny Productions at the 8X10 Play Festival. Another short play, Perfect Mate, was read in the Flash Play Festival at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando. Most recently, her play, The Existential Marionette, was selected by the New Jersey Rep to be part of their Brut Festival this coming September.

Jeanne holds graduate degrees in theater from Indiana University and the University of Georgia. She is a member of the Dramatist Guild, and sits on the board of The New England Theater Conference and the Vermont Playwrights Circle. She lives in Roxbury, Vermont and teaches English & Theater at Norwich University.

Jeanne Beckwith

Jared Eberlein

Jared Eberlein (Playwright) began his career as an actor; earning a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Drew University, then working for nearly a decade in New York and regional theatre. A serendipitous encounter with award-winning composer David Mallamud, however, would quickly turn Jared’s focus from the stage to the page and their collaboration would produce the musicals, The Facts of Life (Pace University), The Man in the Iron Mask (Emerging Artists Theatre, 13th Street Rep & The Snapple Center) and Soldier Songs. His plays include: Precious Thieves (LabTheatreProject, Tampa), The Heir of Pretending, Jack: a love story (Snorks & Pins, NYC) and, from his time as Playwright-in-Residence for the Choate Rosemary Hall Summer Theatre Institute, (Children of) October Ever After and Just Begin. Jared holds an M.F.A. in Writing for Stage and Screen from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, has written two feature-length screenplays and advocates fiercely for all arts education. He currently serves as the Director of Theatre Programs at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Flanagan is a resident playwright of 3Girls Theatre in San Francisco and a member of the SF PlayGround writer’s pool. She is a cofounder of Ex Nihilo Theater and previously served on the board of the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco. Elizabeth’s plays have been produced by: San Francisco Theater Pub, All Terrain Theater, Awesome Theatre, Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco, and Wily West Productions. She is currently writing a play for the 2018 San Francisco Olympians Festival. You can follow Elizabeth on twitter @writesinpublic.

Elizabeth Flanagan

John W Smart

John W Smart is a California native who works as a legal clearance administrator on feature films (and occasionally television) in Los Angeles for various film companies, including Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, and A-24. His credits include Lady Bird, Sicario, Looper and well over 40 other projects over many years.

John is a graduate of the University of New Mexico with a BFA in acting and has a directing certificate from the now-defunct British American Theater Institute in Santa Fe. He has directed two plays in Los Angeles, one of which, A Shot Of Recovery, was an L.A. Weekly pick of the week.

He has also taught high school history and organized “theater camp” via All Saints Church in Pasadena bringing theater workshops to at-risk high school students. He is on the board of directors of the Pleasant Valley Horse Foundation in French Corral, California.

During an entirely predictable late mid-life crisis he fell back in love with theater after seeing a production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Mark Taper Forum and began writing screenplays, teleplays and plays.

Greg Parker has been involved in theatre since the 4th grade. After performing in multiple community and school shows in high school, he graduated from college with a Degree in History and a Degree in Directing. He is the Resident Artist for New Classics Company of Hyannis, MA, where he has written and directed three shows, and produced multiple 24-hour play festivals, and where he performs in improv shows. Recently, Greg can be primarily found at the Hatbox Theatre in Concord, NH, where he designs sound and projections, and where he occasionally acts. He is excited to be a part of this fellowship, and cannot wait to get started

Playwright Fellows Blog

Playwriting 101 – The Case For Structure

As playwrights, writers, and, even more fundamentally, storytellers, we are crafting works that are shaped according to a basic structure - a structure that has been identified and quantified ever since Aristotle’s Poetics. And using these prescribed building blocks and raw materials is what gives our stories a solid foundation.…
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2018 Playwright Fellows – Intro

Over the course of the fellowship, we will be creating posts about different aspects of playwriting and theatre as a way to spur thoughts and discussions. Hopefully, these will inspire and provide additional insights for you and our fellows as they endeavor to create their new works.  We all know…
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What Keeps Us Coming Back?

In my post about structure (Playwriting 101 - the Case For Structure) I mention that athletic competition keenly demonstrates most of the important elements of dramatic structure and that it has a certain advantage - the ending has yet to be written; it is drama in real time. So, how…
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