Hosted by

Catherine

Whiteman

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Produced by

Echo

Theatre

Madeleine George / 02.24.2021 Season 2: Episode 1

Madeleine George's play The Most Massive Woman Wins premiered as part of the Young Playwrights Festival at the Public Theater in 1994. Since then, her plays, including The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England (Susan Smith Blackburn finalist), Precious Little, and The Zero Hour (Jane Chambers Award, Lambda Literary Award finalist), have been produced and developed by Playwrights Horizons, 13P, Clubbed Thumb, Shotgun Players in Berkeley, City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Theater Wit in Chicago, and Perseverance Theater in Alaska, among other places. She has received a Whiting Award, the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, and two MacDowell Fellowships, and she holds commissions from the Sloan Foundation/Manhattan Theatre Club, the Big Ten Theatre Consortium, and the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Madeleine is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a founding member of the Obie-Award-winning playwrights collective 13P (www.13p.org), and the Mellon Playwright in Residence at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. Echo has produced two of her plays, Precious Little and the regional premiere of her unpublished work, Hurricane Diane.

Anyika McMillan-Herrod / 11.30.2020 Season 1: Episode 6

 featuring Tonya Holloway

Author... Essayist... Playwright... Poet... A native of Dallas, Texas, Herod is co-founder of Soul Rep Theatre Company and former editor of The Dallas Examiner. Herod’s play about her journey through breast cancer, THE MONARCH, made its world premiere in June 2018, in a co-production with Echo Theater.  She adapted two Latin American short stories by Juan Rulfo and Alfredo Cardona Peña for Teatro Dallas’ 2017 Day of the Dead production –AN EVENING WITH TWO GIANTS. Herod was commissioned to write a play - DO NO HARM - inspired by three enslaved women who served as "guinea pigs" for" the "Father of Gynecology." DO NO HARM makes its world premiere in 2021 as a film. Anyika is a 2019 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project, holds a BFA in Theater from Prairie View A&M University, and studied acting in California Institute of the Arts’ MFA program. 

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Anyika is joined on the podcast by her Soul Rep colleague, Tonya Holloway, who served as cinematographer when the play DO NO HARM was produced as a film instead of onstage.  

CQ (Christina Quintana) / 11.15.2020 Season 1: Episode 5

Playwright... Television Writer... Consultant... Poet... Queer with Cuban and Louisiana Roots... SCISSORING via Dramatists Play Service... CQ's poetry, fiction, and lyric nonfiction are published in Santa Clara Review, Wildness Journal, OnCuba, Nimrod Journal, Foglifter, great weather for MEDIA, and beyond... Author of poetry chapbook The Heart Wants (Finishing Line Press)... fellowships and residencies from WP Theater, MacDowell (Ernest and Red Heller Fellow), Playwrights Realm, Van Lier/New Voices at The Lark, CubaOne, Queer/Art, and Lambda Literary, as well as commissions from Audible, The Civilians, Palo Alto Playhouse, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Project, Peppercorn Theatre Company, and more. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.

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There is "other" and "in-between" in all of us; CQ tells stories that mine the misconception of dissimilarity and proclaim, "You are not alone." (In 2021, the Echo Reads play reading series will present her play THE GREAT LONELY ROAMER AND THE NIGHT THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING.)

Deborah Zoe Laufer / 10.31.2020 Season 1: Episode 4

Playwright... Director... BFA in acting from SUNY Purchase... Graduated Julliard Playwriting program under Marsha Norman… Plays produced at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cleveland Playhouse, Geva Theatre Center, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Portland Stage, and The Humana Festival…Recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, the Lilly Award, grants and commissions from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The Edgerton Foundation, The National New Play Network, the NEA, and the LeCompte du Nouy grant (Lincoln Center Foundation.) Echo Theatre has produced Deb’s plays: End Days (2010) and Leveling Up (Echo Reads play reading series.)

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On writing during the COVID pandemic: “With playwrighting, these are very tough times, and I know a lot of writers who are saying, ‘Why write right now; what do I have that’s important enough to say, am I of service in writing this?’ ...I don’t know my place in the world and can’t understand what’s happening around me unless I start writing about it, so it’s not even a choice anymore.”

Rhiana Yazzie / 10.15.2020 Season 1: Episode 3

Navajo playwright... filmmaker... director... performer... producer...based in the Twin Cities and founded New Native Theater in 2009...2018/19 Bush Leadership Fellow...2017 Sally Award Winner for Vision...2016/2017 Playwrights’ Center McKnight Fellow, 2010/2011 and 2006/2007 Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow...Playwrights’ Center Core Member for three years.  She is in post production with her first feature film, A WINTER LOVE (writer/director/starring). 

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New Native Theatre is a new way of looking at, thinking about, and staging Native American stories.  NNT produces, commissions, and devises authentic Native American stories for the stage which means NNT’s artists are intricately connected to the concerns and voices of their communities. Meant to be played for its most vital audience, Native people, because stories made for the Native community become undeniably powerful for the broader community too, no translations required.

Ann Timmons / 09.30.2020  Season 1: Episode 2 

MFA in Acting, University of Illinois...NYC to seek her fortune...honed playwriting skills at Playwrights Horizons Theatre School. Produced one-woman show, Off the Wall: The Life and Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Off-Broadway; toured it nationally for 16 years. Other productions explore accepted history, featuring protagonists who upend the status quo. …actor…director…playwright...communication coach...producer.

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Ann is a proud member of Actors' Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, the Dramatists Guild, Honor Roll!, The Playwrights Circle, and is a founding producing playwright of the Pipeline Playwrights, a collective of five women committed to supporting, promoting, and presenting each other’s work, with the goal getting more women’s stories onstage and into the local and national theatre pipeline.

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Caridad Svich / 09.15.2020  Season 1: Episode 1 

2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement Playwright… 2018 ATHE Ellen Stewart Career Achievement in Professional Theatre… 2018 Tanne Foundation Award… songwriter…translator…editor…educator.

Born in the US of Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents.   

"As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones,

the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work, but

also an idea made manifest through the enactment of writing, its performance, and my living of it."