The Goodman Theatre has selected four Chicago-based female playwrights to participate in its 2018-2019 Playwrights Unit—a season-long residency dedicated to developing the work of emerging writers.
The 2018-2019 cycle includes playwrights Georgette Kelly, Dianne Nora, Marisela Treviño Orta, and Stacey Rose. Presented in association with Chicago Dramatists, the writers meet bi-monthly to discuss their commissioned plays-in-progress with the support of the Goodman artistic team. The residency culminates in a public staged reading of each new play in summer 2019. Plays developed in the Unit have gone on to receive readings and workshop productions in the New Stages series, as well as full productions at the Goodman.
Kelly’s play I Carry Your Heart received the inaugural Hope on Stage Playwriting Award, accompanied by a rolling world premiere, and Ballast was featured on The Kilroys List and received the Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Play.
Nora is a playwright, dramaturg, theatre scholar and comedy writer who works in Chicago, Brooklyn, and Dublin, Ireland. Her full-length plays include Julie (25F), Western Country, In Rooms Such as These, Everybody’s Legs, Wasps, Ye That Dwell in Dust, Prodigal, and Monica: This Play Is Not About Monica Lewinsky.
Orta is a graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and a Playwrights’ Center Core Writer. Orta’s play Wolf at the Door will receive a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere at New Jersey Repertory Company, Kitchen Dog Theater, Milagro Theatre, and Halcyon Theatre. She is working on an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit and has also begun a new cycle of worst-case scenario plays—sci-fi thriller plays including WMB (pronounced “womb”) and Nightfall.
Rose is an alum of the MFA program in dramatic writing at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. While at Tisch she was the recipient of an AAUW Career Development Grant, was a Future Screenwriting Fellow, and honored with The Goldberg Prize for her play The Danger: A Homage to Strange Fruit. Her work has been presented at UNC Charlotte, On Q Productions, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, The Bushwick Starr Reading Series (Igniting The Alabaster You!), The Amoralists Theatre Compay (Bones, Bonez, Bone$), Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre (Muva Death), and The National Black Theatre (The Ballad O’ Nigg-O-Lee).
The Goodman is also seeking Chicago-based directors for its 2018-2019 Michael Maggio Directing Fellowship, which is awarded each fall to an early-career Chicago-based director, providing that artist with a stipend, an opportunity to assist one of the theatre's resident directors on a Goodman production, and the chance to become involved in the ongoing artistic life of the Goodman. For submission details click here.
