Book Wings Russia 2013 (Drama)

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Performance date: Thursday, March 14th, 2013, 10:30a.m. (U.S. central time) / 7:30p.m. (Moscow time) (Run time: 2 hours)

Location: Theatre B of the University of Iowa Theatre Arts Building, Iowa City, IA / Moscow Art Theatre, Moscow, Russia
Genre: Drama
Theme: Contact

Commissioned Plays (8-10 minutes each):

The Dream House by Sherry Kramer: An ailing woman buys a home in the woods, populated, it turns out, by animal spirit guides: a frog, a garter snake, and a skunk. Chaos, confusion, and a wedding ensue.

The Dead Parent Club by Carlos Murillo: Two collegues cross paths in a stairwell and a casual exchange takes them back in time.

Planet X by Victoria Stewart: Planet X? Does it exist? Jim believes that it does...and that it's about to collide with Earth. Today. His wife, Jean, has lived through several of his apocalyptic crises and lived to tell the tale. What happens when she convinces her friend Lisa to join them in the bunker, promising "it'll be fun"?

Intimacy by Marina Krapivina: On this day in Moscow, the customer is never right and frustration is contagious. Characters get caught on the wrong side of the counter and only one manages to get himself heard.

The Vorski are Near, But Not Enough by Maksym Kurochkin: A university professor invites a friend to speak to his class about paranoia, a condition the friend knows a lot about. But is his friend paranoid enough?

Letters by Natalya Moshina: Without answering any of his interviewer's questions, a man tells more about himself than anyone was expecting.

Commissioned Playwrights (United States):

Sherry Kramer's plays include When Something Wonderful Ends (Humana Festival), The Wall of Water (Yale Repertory Theatre), David’s Redhaired Death (Woolly Mammoth Theatre), What a Man Weighs (Second Stage), The World at Absolute Zero (EST Marathon), Things That Break (Theatre of the First Amendment), Partial Objects (Mill Mountain Theatre), A Thing of Beauty (Hedgebrook Women’s Playwright Festival), The Law Makes Evening Fall (Sundance Festival), The Mad Master (commissioned by the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Foundation), The Ruling Passion (New Harmony Project), and The Master and Margarita (a singing theatre adaptation w/Margaret Pine, O’Neill Center National Music Theatre Conference).  Her newest plays are How Water Behaves and The Bay of Fundy.  She has been awarded NEA, NYFA, and McKnight Fellowships, The Weissberger Award, a New York Drama League Award, The Marvin Taylor Award, The LA Women in Theatre Award, and the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award.  She was the first National Member of New Dramatists.  She teaches playwriting at Bennington College, in the MFA programs of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and at the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.

Carlos Murillo’s plays have been produced throughout the US and internationally.  Recent works include: dark play or stories for boys (Humana Festival, Theatre der Stadt Aalen in  Germany, Vigszinhaz in Budapest), A Thick Description of Harry Smith (P73 NYC), Diagram of a Paper Airplane (Sundance Theatre Lab), Mayday Mayday Tuesday (commissioned by Playwrights Horizons), and Your Name Will Follow You Home (commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre). His work has been published by Dramatists Play Service, Smith & Kraus, Heinmann and Theatre Forum. He has received the Ofner Prize from the Goodman Theatre, the Otis Guernsey Award from the William Inge Festival, and two National Latino Playwriting Awards from Arizona Theatre Company. He is a resident playwright of New Dramatists and Chicago Dramatists, and currently heads the Playwriting Program at DePaul University in Chicago, where he lives with his wife and children.

Victoria Stewart graduated from the University of Iowa. Her new play, Rich Girl, will be co-produced by George Street Playhouse and Cleveland Playhouse in the spring of 2013.  Her plays include Hardball (SPF, Live Girls! Theater), 800 WORDS: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick (Caravan Theatre, Workhaus Collective, Live Girls! Theater, Hourglass Group), Live Girls (Urban Stages, WHAT, Stage Left), Leitmotif (South Coast Repertory), The Last Scene, and an adaptation of Henry James’ The Bostonians. She also collaborated on Fissures (lost and found) with Dominique Serrand and Steve Epp, (2010 Humana Festival). Recently, she wrote a screenplay for HBO, Appetite for Self-Destruction, and created Clandestino (secret, illegal, hidden) about the INS raid in Postville, IA, with Cory Hinkle and Wilhelm Bros. and Co. (Mixed Blood Theatre), as well as Mercy Watson to the Rescue (commissioned and produced at Children’s Theatre Company). She has received the Francesca Primus Award, a McKnight Advancement Grant, the Helen Merrill Award, and the Jerome Fellowship. She is a producing member of the Workhaus Collective, a core member of the Playwrights’ Center, and a member of WGA West.

Commissioned Playwrights (Russia):

Maksym Kurochkin (b. 1970) became known after the Moscow premiere of his play, Kitchen, in 2000. Since that time, his plays have been produced in Moscow at Teatr.doc, the Pushkin Theatre, the Et Cetera Theatre, and the Playwright and Director Center. His plays have been translated into all the major European languages. Kurochin is the recipient of numerous prizes, including Boldest Experiment of the Year award from the Moskovsky Komsomolets Daily for Kitchen, and the Russian Anti-Booker award from Nezavisimaya Gazeta for Steel Will. His subsequent plays include Repress and Excite; Vodka, Fucking and Television; Steel Will; Tsurikov; Fighter Class Medea; The Schooling of Bento Bonchev; and Mooncrazed. Vodka, Fucking and Television, and Repress and Excite were published in Theatre Forum. Kurochkin has acted in films, and writes for Russian film and television. Originally from the Ukraine, he now resides in Moscow with his wife and daughters.

Marina Krapivina began writing plays in 2009 and has been a finalist in numerous drama competitions, including Premiera.txt, Lyubimovka, Free Theatre, Eurasia, Texture, and Goldenmask. In 2010, she was invited to the Yale School of Drama, where her play Ides of March was performed at the Yale Cabaret and at La Mama Theatre in New York. In 2011, Krapivina took part in a theatrical project as part of the National Theatrical Festival Texture-Olimp in Sochi, Russia. In 2012, two of her plays were staged in Tallinn, Estonia: Stavanger at the New Theatre, directed by Yurii Muravitsky and Russians They Are Such…with co-authors Alexey Zenzinov and Ludmila Cachmarik, directed by Yulia Aug.  In September 2012, PULP PEOPLE Stavanger, based on her play Stavanger, opened at the Liepaja Theatre in Latvia.

Natalya Moshina made her debut in 2004 at the Lyubimovka Festival of Contemporary Drama in Moscow and is the winner of several Russian playwriting contests and awards for drama. She is the author of nine plays: Triangle, (Just) Pervoushin, Techniques of Breathing in an Airlocked Space, Bullet, Rikotu Island, Beneath the Heaven, Relatives, Heat, and Ad Astra. Of these, Triangle, Techniques of Breathing in an Airlocked Space, Bullet, Rikotu Island, Heat, and Ad Astra have been widely staged, both in Russia and abroad.  She participated in the London Theater Royal Court seminar in 2004, as well as in Live Author for Live Theatre, a joint project of the Festival “Lyubimovka” and Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater in Saint-Petersburg, 2008, and The American Play in Russian, a joint project of the Festival “Lyubimovka” and the Lark Play Development Center in New York, 2012.

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