P&T Knitwear is pleased to welcome seven of the Tent Theater Company's generous and passionate cohort of writers for an eclectic evening of material read by the authors and a few friends. Selections will be 5-7 minute scenes and excerpts from new works and old favorites. Get interactive with a playwright and be part of the process with a dramatist!
This month's lineup will be featuring Beth Henley, Jeffrey Jones, Kira Obolensky, Peter Parnell, Eddie Sanchez, and Kathleen Tolan.
- This is a ticketed in-store event with limited amphitheater-style seating. Doors open at 6:30pm.
- Cost of a $10 general admission ticket entitles each ticket holder to a $5 gift card which can be applied towards purchases in the bookstore or at the café.
- The readings will be followed by a book signing. Books will be available for sale by The Tent.
- We encourage all guests to wear masks.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS
Beth Henley is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and professor. Her plays include Crimes of The Heart (Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play), The Wake of Jamey Foster, The Miss Firecracker Contest, Am I Blue, The Lucky Spot, The Debutante Ball, Abundance, Control Freaks, Impossible Marriage, Family Week, Ridiculous Fraud, The Jacksonian, Laugh, and The Unbuttoning.
Jeff Jones is a playwright and essayist whose principal work has explored alternatives to representational, narrative dramatic forms. Two early plays, Nightcoil (1978) and 70 Scenes Of Halloween (1980), introduced techniques—respectively, simultaneous action; and discontinuous action and stylistic variation—that he has since reworked and redeployed in various ways. From 1984 to 1990, Jones completely abandoned conventional authorship in favor of appropriated texts and collage assembly, culminating in The Crazy Plays, a series of tiny, interrelated plays with repeated dialog, loops, and interchangeable characters. Three subsequent plays were investigations of puppetry, in which a principal character was represented by a stuffed animal, manipulated by an onstage actor.
Kira Obolensky’s plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theaters, and presented in festivals in Prague and Terezin. She has received the Kesselring Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Mellon Playwright Fellowship in residence with the award-winning theater Ten Thousand Things. The Mellon fellowship allowed her to develop a body of work that considers audiences beyond the traditional, mainstream theater. These plays were written and conceived to be performed by a company of excellent actors, with sets stripped down to the minimum, all the lights on and presented in sites ranging from places of incarceration to rural Minnesota, to homeless shelters.
Peter Parnell’s plays have been produced by Lincoln Center Theater Company, Playwrights Horizons, the Public Theater, the Atlantic Theater Company, as well as at the Seattle Rep, the Mark Taper Forum, and Trinity Rep. In addition to other TV shows, Mr. Parnell was a co-producer for The West Wing (two Emmy Award® citations). His children’s book And Tango Makes Three, co-authored with his husband Justin Richardson, was an American Library Association Notable Book, a Henry Bergh Award winner, a Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year, and has been translated into a dozen languages. It has been on the ALA’s Top Ten List of Most Banned Books for many years since its publication almost twenty years ago. Parnell is working with the Writers Guild Initiative to fight book bans and is a member of Authors Against Book Bans.
Eddie Sanchez’s work includes La Bella Familia, Trafficking In Broken Hearts, I’ll Take Romance, Diosa, Unmerciful Good Fortune, Icarus, and Barefoot Boy With Shoes On. His work has been produced regionally throughout the United States as well as Brazil, Russia, and Switzerland.
Among his awards are the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays (Clean), three New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting/Screenwriting Fellowships, the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and the AT&T On Stage New Play Award.
Kathleen Tolan’s play Memory House premiered at Playwrights Horizons in Spring ‘05, and has been produced at many theaters, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, Victory Gardens, Seattle Rep, and Trinity Rep. Other plays include Kate’s Diary (Playwrights Horizons and the Public Theater); A Girl’s Life (Trinity Rep); The Wax (Playwrights Horizons); A Weekend Near Madison (Actors Theatre of Louisville, Astor Place Theatre, and theaters across the country and in Europe); The Cottage; What To Listen For; I Was Reading a Novel by Javier Marías; and, most recently, Acting School. She is writing a memoir called Remember This. She has written for TV and film.
