Thursday, December 31, 2009

9th Annual Bay One Acts Playwrights' Biographies

Three Wise Monkeys is thrilled with the quality and caliber of the playwriting talent for the upcoming 9th Annual Bay One Acts.

CRISH BARTH (Reading with Friends, Program 1) is thrilled to be part of his 3rd BOA Festival and honored to be selected for Jessica Holt's inaugural season as Artistic Director of Three Wise Monkeys. Crish had an exciting 2009 with two productions in New York (where his lead won best actor of the Strawberry One Act Festival), one in Midway, Kentucky during which, if he had attended, he may very well have appeared on the television show Good Morning Kentucky - and various appearances and readings here and there amidst the vibrant Bay Area. Crish is a company member of PlayGround.

TIM BAUER (Three Little Words, Program 2) is a San Francisco playwright. His work for the stage includes the full-length plays Exit Wounds (PlayLabs semifinalist), Zombie Town (Sleepwalkers Theatre) and Beyond Words (Aurora Theater Global Age Project finalist); the one-act plays Hot Spot (National 10-Minute Play Contest finalist), Starting Over (National 10-Minute Play Contest finalist), The Magic Word (Sleepwalkers Theatre) and I’ll Be Home For Christmas (Best of PlayGround Festival). He has been a two-time finalist for the Humana Festival's Heideman Award, a semifinalist for the Nicholl Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2007 Sloan Initiative commission from Magic Theatre and a 2009 PlayGround Fellowship commission. Tim is a member of the Magic Theatre’s Artist Lab, the PlayGround Writers Pool, and the Dramatists Guild.


WILLIAM BIVINS (Altered Landscape, Program 1) is an award-winning playwright, recovering screenwriter and library school drop-out. With five world premieres in one year (four of them full-length plays), he is, by some counts, the most produced Bay Area playwright of the current season. His Biblical comedy "Pulp Scripture" was the smash hit of the 2009 San Francisco Fringe Festival, winning eight SF Fringe Awards, including Best New Comedy. "The Afterlife of the Mind," a brain transplantation comedy, premiered in Berkeley in the fall of 2009 and went up in Anchorage in early 2010. His paranoid thriller “The Position,” commissioned and produced by PianoFight, is running in February at Off-Market Theater. His agricultural noir play "The Apotheosis of Pig Husbandry" will premiere at the SF Playhouse in May. He was one of twelve Bay Area playwrights chosen in 2008 for Theatre Bay Area/TheatreWorks Playwrights Showcase and has been a finalist for the Heideman Award in the National Ten-minute Play Contest. His plays have been featured in the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Off-Market Theater, San Francisco Fringe Festival and New Writers/New Works. He has won awards from the SF Fringe Festival, Nantucket Short Play Competition, the Rochester International Film Festival and the Palo Alto Film Festival.


STUART BOUSEL (Housebroken, Program 2) graduated from Reed College with a degree in English/Creative Writing. He has served as the artistic director of three theater companies: Quicksilver Productions Inc. and Horror Unspeakable Productions in Tucson, and No Nude Men Productions in San Francisco, in addition to being an associate artist with Atmostheatre Inc. and a founding member of the SF Theater Pub. He has directed a number of classic plays in addition to a number of world premieres, including David Duman's FISHING, Alison Luterman's OASIS and Nirmala Nataraj's THE MONK. He is the exclusive adaptor of Peter S. Beagle's novel GIANT BONES. His original works include THE EXILED, VINCENT OF GILGAMESH, SPEAK TO ME, MATHEW 33:6, LOVE EGOS ALTERNATIVE ROCK, TROIJKA and POLYXENA IN ORBIT and he has been produced in New York City, San Francisco, Melbourne, Portland, Tucson, Dublin, West Orange and Nutley, NJ. The book DRY COUNTRY is a collection of his short stories and CERBEUS BARKING is a collection of three of his plays; both available on Amazon.com. He occasionally acts. Find out more at www.horrorunspeakable.com.


JON BROOKS (Catcher in the Rye (Cancelled) Program 1) was a co-writer of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s 2006 and 2007 summer productions – Godfellas and Making a Killing. His one-act play, Better Than Hitler, has been produced in New York, San Francisco, and Bologna, Italy. His one-act November 2001 was staged for the 2005 San Francisco Fringe Festival and his full-length play The Button ran at The Bloomington Playwrights Project in Indiana. His full-length Shoot O'Malley Twice was a finalist for this year's Yale Drama Series Award. Jon received an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College.


MEGAN COHEN (The Great Double Check, Program 2) has had work produced in SF and NYC, mostly by companies with sassy names, like Pianofight! and Robot Vs. Dinosaur! As a dramaturg, she has apprenticed at super-established American Conservatory Theater, and with OBIE-winning group The Builders Association. Unlike her other plays, “Double Check” is nice, well-groomed, and doesn’t know any swear words. More at www.megancohen.com.

BENNETT FISHER's (Query, Program 1) one act Exchange was produced at last year’s BOA festival, under the direction of Jessica Holt. Other works include the short pieces Daedalus (BOA Short Leaps) andFootprints in the Applesauce (produced by Threshold Theatre for the San Francisco Theatre Festival and for the Elephant in the Room Festival in Boston), and the full length plays Spark(Element Festival in Chicago), Leviathan (WCNI Radio, New London), and a translation of Euripides’ Cyclops for the San Francisco Theatre Pub. Upcoming pieces include Hermes: The Cost of Doing Business for the No Nude Men Olympian Festival this summer and The Air Without Stars. Also an aspiring actor and director, Bennett has collaborated with the California Shakespeare Theatre, Intersection for the Arts, Threshold Theatre, AtmosTheatre (where he is an associate artist), No Nude Men, the Pear Avenue Theatre, New Conservatory Theatre, Stanford Summer Theatre, Off-Broadway West, and is a founding member of the San Francisco Theatre Pub. He is a recent graduate of Connecticut College and the National Theatre Institute of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. Bennett teaches playwriting at several schools in the area and last year at the African Leadership Academy in South Africa.

DANIEL HEATH (Nothing Works, Program 2) is a three-time winner of the PlayGround Emerging Playwright Award (2007/08/09), and a recipient of the PlayGround Fellowship. He won PianoFight's first Shortlived short-play contest in 2008. His short plays have been performed as far away as Toronto, Canada. His full-length comedies FORKING and FORKING II: A MERRY FORKING CHRISTMAS were produced by PianoFight in 2008 and 2009 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

SAM LEICHTER (The Philadelphian, Program 2) is thrilled to make his playwrighting debut with BOA. As an actor, Sam has performed with Center REP, Boxcar, AtmosTheatre, Threshold, Hella Fresh, Brava!, Marin Shakes, Delaware Shakespeare Festival and Hedgerow Theatre, and has understudied at Berkeley Rep and Cutting Ball.

EDWARD LUHN (Generic Play, Program 1) is an American expatriate living in San Francisco. He is a prolific writer of cover letters and YouTube comments, despite a crippling lifelong addiction to oxygen. He enjoys onion rings, consonants, and Bernadette Peters. When the Mother Ship comes, he's outta here."


LAUREN YEE (The Life and Death of Joshua Zweig, Program 2) has been a 2009 MacDowell Colony fellow, a 2008/09 Dramatists Guild fellow, and a member of the 2009 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group. She has been a finalist for the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, and the Heideman Award, the Jerome Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award, the PONY Fellowship, and the Wasserstein Prize. She has received commissions from the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the O’Neill Studio at Yale, PlayGround, and the Theatre Bay Area New Work Fund (with AlterTheater). Other honors include Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Pacific Rim Prize and the Yale Playwrights Festival. She has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat, and the New York Mills Arts Retreat, and funding from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and Theatre Bay Area. A recent Yale graduate, Lauren is currently pursuing her MFA in playwriting at UCSD, under Naomi Iizuka.


For complete festival program and ticket information, please go to: threewisemonkeys.org

Sunday, December 13, 2009

9th Annual Bay One Acts Program Announcement!

Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company

is very proud to announce its programming for

The 9th Annual Bay One Acts (BOA)!


February 18th - March 13th, 2010 at Boxcar Theatre in San Francisco.

Ticket information to come soon!


Program 1

Generic Play by Edward Luhn

Dir: Jill MacClean, Managing Producer, Playwrights Foundation

Somewhat clinical dramatization of perennial domestic conflict, with brief but humorous denouement.


Query by Ben Fisher

Dir: Meg O’Connor, Administrative Director, Playwrights Center

A dark comedy about bureaucracy, art, and language.


Catcher in the Rye (Cancelled) by Jon Brooks

Dir: Jessica Holt, Threshold

A hilarious parody of the perils of copyright infringement, fair use and dramatic license.


Reading with Friends by Crish Barth

Dir: Paul Cello, Climate Theatre

Four friends have reluctantly gathered in a small apartment on a cold winter night to read the parts of Barry's latest play out loud. Only thing missing? Barry and the play.


Altered Landscape by William Bivins

Dir: Claire Zawa, Three Wise Monkeys

Frank and Lena canoe out to the river island where they spent their honeymoon. When they wake to find the river choked with logs, they are forced to confront their entrapment--both on the island and in their lives.


The Philadelphian by Sam Leichter

Dir: Rob Ready, Piano Fight

George can't remember what he said or did last night... but Devon can. With friends like these, who needs enemies?


Program 2


Three Little Words by Tim Bauer

Dir: Alex Curtis, Playpen Theatre

Romeo and Juliet. The entire play. All the speeches. All the characters. With four actors. In three-word sentences. Which can't be done.


The Great Double Check by Megan Cohen

Dir: Claire Zawa, Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company

Two friends' hunt for a missing wallet turns into an all-out screwball when a mysterious stranger reveals a secret that will change everyone's future.

Oh my goodness what could it be?


Housebroken by Stuart Bousel

Dir: Claire Rice, No Nude Men

A fable that may be about hubris, adoption, snobbery, music, class, lifestyle, marriage, ambition, parenthood, insecurity, art and/or humility. The author admits that after two years of lessons he still couldn't play the piano, and suspects he's not the only one.


Nothing Works by Daniel Heath

Dir: Amy Claire Tasker, General Manager at Cutting Ball

A short comedy about failure.


The Life and Death of Joshua Zweig by Lauren Yee

Dir: Tore Ingersoll-Thorp, Sleepwalkers Theatre

Today, Joshua Zweig will die. Or rather, there is a very highly probability that he will. At least according to Dead Joshua Zweig, the ghost who has come back to warn him of his impending death. How does a man cope with life in the face of uncertainty? And what happens to those he leaves behind?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

BOA Auditions!


AUDITION NOTICE
9th Annual Bay One Acts (BOA) Festival
February 18 - March 14, 2010
Boxcar Theatre, San Francisco

Audition Dates: December 5 10AM-3PM & December 6 Noon-3PM
Where: Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma Street, SF
(between 6th and 7th and Mission and Howard)
What: Please prepare a 1 minute contemporary monologue.
Audition may also include possible cold read.

Contact: casting@boxcartheatre.org or jessicadirect@gmail.com
to set up an audition appointment

Featuring short plays by Crish Barth, Tim Bauer, Bill Bivins, Stuart Bousel,
Jon Brooks,
Megan Cohen, Ben Fisher, Daniel Heath, Sam Leichter,
Edward Luhn and
Lauren Yee.

Directed by Claire Zawa (Three Wise Monkeys) Amy Claire Tasker (General Manager, Cutting Ball Theatre),
Claire Rice (No Nude Men),
Rob Ready (Piano Fight)
Meg O'Connor (Administrative Director, Playwrights Center/Literary Manager, Cutting Ball Theatre),

Jill MacLean (Managing Producer, Playwrights Foundation),
Tore Ingersoll-Thorp (Sleepwalkers Theatre),
Jessica Holt (Threshold),

Alex Curtis (Zanni Theatre),
and Paul Cello (Instrumental Theatre).


Co-Produced by Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company
Artistic Director, Jessica Holt & Executive Director, Richard Bernier

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Thank you for Leaping!

A Big Thank You to all the amazing artists that donated their time to making Short Leaps a great success!

Thank you wonderful playwrights: Edward Luhn, Crish Barth, Lauren Yee, Megan Cohen, Ben Fisher, Paul Braverman, J. Stephen Brantley, and M.R. Fall. Your plays were brilliant!

Thank you to Claire Zawa and Paul Cello -- the best directing partners!

Thank you to Leslie, Johnny and Richard -- Three Wise Monkeys doesn't work without you!

Thank you to our actors:
Lauren, Brant, Paul, Aaron, Don, Jeffrey, Leslie, Johnny, Jim, Kevin, Laura Jane, Peter, Ashley, Logan, and Sarah!

Looking forward to bounding onto BOA 9!

See you at the theatre!

Jessica

Monday, October 26, 2009

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

SHORT LEAPS DATE/VENUE ANNOUNCEMENT

Short Leaps
A Fundraiser for the 9th Annual Bay One Acts (BOA)

Sunday, November 8 2009 at 7 pm
The Off-Market
Studio 250, 965 Mission St, San Francisco.


Join us for a staged reading of eight new 10-minute plays by Crish Barth, J.Stephen Brantley, Paul Braverman, Megan Cohen, M.R. Fall, Ben Fisher, Edward Luhn and Lauren Yee.

Directed by Paul Cello, Jessica Holt and Claire Zawa

Come Fly the World for Free by Crish Barth

In the aftermath of a commercial airline terror incident, an air marshall is confronted with the question - did he do his job or not?


Good God Enters Flossing by J. Stephen Brantley


It’s a normal morning for Josh, Dinsmore, and Billy until the Ark Of The Covenant spontaneously materializes in their living room. What sort of message is God sending, and why would He choose a trio of trendy Brooklyn queers to spread the Word?


Therapy by Paul Braverman


Alan arrived as usual for his therapy session, only to discover he's now eligible for his Actor's equity card


Makeout! by Megan Cohen
A repugnant request leads to an explosive monologue on desire and exposure. also, it's totally sad for part of it in the middle, but not the whole time, and will make you fall in love with everyone in the audience


Logical Ends by M.R. Fall


A young woman's Parisian travels push her to the limits of time, space, and (of course) logical ends.


Daedalus by Ben Fisher.


Two men of science consider a leap of faith.

Generic Play by Edward Luhn


Somewhat clinical dramatization of perennial domestic conflict, with brief but humorous denouement.

The Oldest Living Resident by Lauren Yee


A trio of spinster sisters anticipate their aging father's crowning as
their prefecture's "oldest living resident." The only problem is, he's
already dead.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Fresh Out of the Box! SHORT LEAPS!

Three Wise Monkeys is thrilled to announce the program line-up for its annual BOA fundraiser: SHORT LEAPS.

SHORT LEAPS is a very special evening of script-in-hand readings featuring fresh out of the box short plays from seven Bay Area playwrights: Crish Barth, Lauren Yee, Megan Cohen, Edward Luhn, Paul Braverman, Ben Fisher, and M.R. Fall, and one honorary San Franciscan J. Stephen Brantley. It promises to be a funny and provocative night.

All proceeds from the night make possible the 9th Annual Bay One Acts, taking place this coming February and March 2010.

SHORT LEAPS will play in October, date/time still TBD. Check back for more details in the next couple of weeks!

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Monkeying around at the SF Theater Festival

Three Wise Monkeys LOVED contributing to the San Francisco Theater Festival today! What a treat to do our two pieces on The Forum stage to a packed, standing-room only sold out house.

Cooper Carlson and Joseph Scheppers
in "Maybe Tov"

More than 600 eyes savored Pamela Davis' delightful and sharp comedy MAYBE TOV and Crish Barth's erudite comedy SAVE THE DATE. People howled and clapped, snickered and sucked in their breath at all the right moments. It was incredibly wonderful!

A BIG thank you to Cooper Carlson, Pamela Davis and Joe Scheppers for donating their time and energy to creating such a spirited program. Also, thank you to Ben Fisher for working as an associate producer today, helping us out with last minute needs. Lastly, THANK YOU to the SF Theater Festival and our lovely stage manager Victoria Swift.

3WM has always thought that theater should have the crazy, palpable energy you feel when you walk into a rock concert or a sporting event....and today...we got it!

Looking forward to creating more sharp, funny, well-crafted stories for the stage.

See you in just a couple of months for our annual fundraiser, Short Leaps, featuring 7 BRAND NEW 10-minute plays by Bay Area playwrights!

Jessica Holt
Artistic Director, Three Wise Monkeys

Thursday, July 2, 2009

3WM at the San Francisco Theatre Festival!

Three Wise Monkeys presents at the 2009 San Francisco Theatre Festival.

Join us at Yerba Buena Gardens Sunday July 26th at The Forum Stage at 3:25 for two funny, clever short plays by talented Bay Area playwrights.

Maybe Tov by Pamela Davis.
What happens when you aren't sure if you proposed or not, and if your maybe-bride accepted? A comical look at our failure to communicate.

Save the Date by Crish Barth
When Rachel discovers that Paul isn't the guy he suggested he was on his online dating profile, things get a little hairy.

Directed by new Three Wise Monkey Artistic Director Jessica Holt with Cooper Carlson, Joe Scheppers and Pamela Davis.

Join us!

Find more information at http://www.sftheaterfestival.org/

Welcome to the Three Wise Monkeys Blog!

Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company (3WM) is dedicated to supporting, promoting and producing the short plays by San Francisco Bay Area emerging and experienced writers. We are interested in plays that display cultural vitality and theatricality, and demonstrate a unique use of language and poetry.

3WM aims to facilitate the production and recognition of great new theatre in the Bay Area, and part of that process means fostering a collaborative and creative environment in which both new, young voices and more experienced theatre artists can thrive.