DCT INSTITUTE SPRING 2009
Diverse City Theater Opens DCT INSTITUTE for Playwrights Beginning April 2009

with Award-Winning Playwrights Cassandra Medley, Maxine Kern,
and Linda Faigao-Hall

NEW YORK—Diverse City Theater Company (DCT) announces the launch of DCT Institute, a training program for playwrights of all levels beginning April 2009. 

DCT Institute offers three courses for its Spring 2009 term:  “First Draft” Playwriting Gym with Cassandra Medley; “Focus 20:20” Dramaturgy with Maxine Kern; and “Playwriting 101” Mentorship with Linda Faigao-Hall.

“FIRST DRAFT” PLAYWRITING GYM with Cassandra Medley

The workshop is designed for playwrights at any level: beginners as well as practiced writers who wish to fine-tune their skills.  In the course of ten weeks each writer will create a 10 to 30-minute play from "the ground up."  We will use specifically designed writing exercises that help to inspire, nurture, and sustain your story ideas from initial inception through to a completed working draft.  We will concentrate on building the inner lives of your characters through in-depth character and story explorations.  At the end of the 10-week course, developed plays will be presented in a staged reading format for which DCT will assign directors and actors. 

CASSANDRA MEDLEY has taught at Columbia University, New York University, University of Iowa, Vanderbilt University and is presently tenured as Professor of Playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College.  In addition, she has been an invited guest speaker at Yale University.  Her most recent play, Noon Day Sun, was produced in August by Diverse City Theater, and nominated for various awards including the Audelco for Best Dramatic Production of the Year and Best Play.  It was featured on NBC as Time Out New York’s Best Bet for the season.  In addition, her play, Relativity, produced in 2006 by Ensemble Studio Theatre, won the 2006 August Wilson Award, and was featured on NPR "Science Friday."    Additional plays have been produced throughout the U.S.  Her awards include 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award-Ensemble Studio Theatre; the Theatrefest Best Play of 2001; the Outer Critics in 1982; New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 1986 and the New York State Council for the Arts Grant in 1987. She was a 1989 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award in Playwriting and won the 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Award and the 1995 New Professional Theatre Award.

“FOCUS 20:20” DRAMATURGY with Maxine Kern

This one-on-one DCT Institute course is for playwrights who have completed a first or several drafts of a play and would like to have dramaturgical collaboration to move it to the next level.  The next level could be either submission to active producers or theater companies, a rehearsal that is pending for production, or submission to various playwright contests and/or workshops.  Ms. Kern will work with playwrights from script work, to a reading with DCT actors, to identifying appropriate venues for submission. 

MAXINE KERN is a freelance dramaturg and a lecturer teaching dramaturgy at SUNY Stonybrook. Her most recent dramaturgy includes The Book of Lambert and Mina by Leslie Lee at La MaMa Theatre; On the Line as a participating playwright & dramaturg at The 78th Street Laboratory Theater; For the Time Being by W.H. Auden, Affinity Theatre at Classic Stage Company and Symphony Space; Lead dramaturg and curator for Diverse City Theater’s The Equality Plays Festival in 2006 at Theatre Row, Harold Clurman Theatre. She has also been a literary manager/dramaturg at various theaters such as New Georges, George Street Playhouse, Company One Theater, and has been part of the artistic staff of The McCarter Theater, The New York Shakespeare Public Theater, and New Dramatists, Inc.  Her dramaturgy has included work with playwrights Arthur Laurents, A.R. Gurney, Deb Margolin, Leslie Lee, Luis Alfaro, PJ Gibson, Keith Glover, Tracey Wilson, among many more.

“PLAYWRITING 101” MENTORSHIP with Linda Faigao-Hall

This is a one-on-one mentorship program designed for novice or beginning playwrights who need to return to the basics. Individualized sessions will focus on the play's structural elements: plot, character, conflict, setting, dramatic language and their organic relationship to theme. Theme is defined as the play's central and dominating truth, the playwright's main idea about the behavior of human beings as it is reflected in her unique employment of character, action, language and image. 

LINDA FAIGAO-HALL’s most recent production was Sparrow at Theatre Row's Lion Theater; The A –Word as part of Snapshots (August 2007) at Theatre Row's Samuel Beckett Theater presented by Diverse City Theater Company. The play will be published in Smith and Kraus’ inaugural publication of the Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2008. Her full-length play, The FeMale Heart was a sold-out hit in June 2007 at the First Asian American Theater Festival, which had premiered as a co-production with Ensemble Studio Theater and Diverse City Theater Company in 2005. Other produced plays include Salad Days and Other Stories; Duet; The Interview (developed and produced by Find Your Voice, Inc.); God, Sex, and Blue Water; Woman From the Other Side of the World; and State Without Grace. Her full-length play, Walking Iron, commissioned by The Working Theatre, was awarded a  National Endowment of  the Arts grant.  Ms. Faigao-Hall has a Master of Arts in English Literature from New York University where she also continued her doctoral studies  in Educational Theater. She also studied Medieval Theater at Bretton Hall College, Wakefield, England. She is currently teaching Literary Criticism at the College of New Rochelle.

FOR FEES AND ADMISSION INQUIRIES:
Contact Martha Zamirski at martha@diversecitytheater.org. 

REQUIREMENTS: 
A statement of purpose (250 words) and either a 5-page scene from an existing play or a one-page monologue.

Download DCT INSTITUTE brochure.

About Diverse City Theater Company

Diverse City Theater Company (“DCT”) develops and produces powerful and thought-provoking works that explore and examine our society’s diversity issues from social, cultural, gender and demographic perspectives; creates multiculturally fluent theater audiences; and advocates the non-traditional casting of actors to reflect the rich spectrum of our national culture and universality of the human spirit. DCT is an independent, non-profit 501(c)(3) theater organization based in New York.

For more information, visit the organization's website at www.diversecitytheater.org.