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