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This page contains information for all the members of The DFW
Playwrights' Alliance and their work.
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Andi Allen is an award-winning
actress/director/playwright whose original plays have been produced
around the country. Her series of children's one act plays have been
very popular with school drama teachers, and her full-length comedy High School Hellcats in Heels was
named one of the funniest shows of the year by The Dallas Observer. For
4 years, Ms. Allen has also written the annual fundraiser musical revue
produced by Uptown Players in Dallas. Web site:
www.andiworld.com
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| Garrison
Ausburn |
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Garrison
Ausburn lives in Northeast Texas
and is in the process, with Mel Baumgartner, of opening a theatre
in the area. One of the major goals of the new theatre is
to produce new works. Also a director and an actor, Garrison’s
plays have been recognized by both SWFTA and KCACTF on the local
and regional levels. His play, Their Mother’s
Hand, was the subject of a report on Fox News Network.
He is currently working on play with music that deals with the role
of religion in rural Texas during the Depression: Brush
Arbor. He is currently working towards certification
in electronic graphic design (primary goal is to market theatre
graphics and publicity items). His master’s thesis is
entitled “A Voice in the Wilderness: Marketing Theatre
in a Nonmetropolitan Area.” |
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Jim Tyler Anderson teaches playwriting and
other theatre courses at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is
a charter member of the Dallas Fort Worth Playwrights Alliance.
His works include: Rudy Rose Rides Again, Idol Hill,
Motherland, Spide-o and the King, and The Wild
Woman of Jackass Canyon. He and his family live in North East
Texas.
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Vicki Caroline Cheatwood’s Off-Off-Broadway
credits include Fits & Starts: The Sacred Heart, produced
by Overlap Productions, The Risen Chris at Vital Theatre,
and 10:10 and The Cowgirl Chronicles, produced by
Actors Stock Company/NYC and Six Figures Theater Company. She's
been a finalist for the Heideman Award (The Risen Chris),
the Julie Harris Playwright Award (An Hour South), and the
Eileen Heckart Drama for Seniors Award (Manicures & Monuments).
Coming in 2006, Manicures & Monuments opens in April
at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., produced
by Journeyman Theater Company. Vicki's writing career is made possible
by the generous support of the ArtsAngels and her family.
Web site:
www.vickicarolinecheatwood.com
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| Jerry
Donda |
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Jerry
Donda is a retired advertising and
public relations professinoal from Chicago currently residing in the
Dallas area and pursuing a career as a writer. He has a Bachelors
in Journalism from the University of Illionois, and a selection of
one-act plays including The Haunted Shirt, Purgatory for Dummies,
THE LADY WITH THE “ I HEART MY DOG “ BUMPERSTICKER
and WHAT MAKES SAMMY DEAD? (R.I.P. /MJG) He is single (widower)
with three children and grandchildren in the Chicago metro area and
enjoys playing blues piano, jazz, photography and of course, writing.
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Scott Eckert is a multi talented fixture of the DFW theater community with quite a successful and award winning career as a musical director, performer and playwright/composer. His Shakespeare For The Modern Man series (Lesson 1: MacBeth and Lesson 2: Hamlet) have both won Leon Rabin Awards for Best New Play respectively. He is also a composer/lyricist for The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and Museum Madness and is currently preparing for the world premiere of his latest work Death: The Musical.
Web site:
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More information about this playwright is coming
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More information about this playwright is coming
soon
Web site:
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Tim Hatcher is a graduate of Yale School of
Drama, and recipient of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship awarded by Texas
Institute of Letters. Produced plays: Bad Roof, The Odyssey
(Leon Rabin Award, 2002), Bartleby: The True Story, Family
Room, The Death of Floyd Collins, Covered Dish, Brendene.
Produced children's plays include: The
White Rainbow Trail, Cosmic Soup, The Happiness Shirt, Beauties and
Beasties. Currently a computer animator
at DNA Productions. |
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More information about this playwright is coming
soon
Web site: www.kimkelly.com
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John Mallory Land is an alumnus of Dallas’ Arts Magnet
High School and of Baylor University (BFA in Directing and Design).
He has enjoyed staged readings and productions of several of his original
scripts locally. John is Co-Founder of Page2Stage Productions, an
independent company focused on the development of original and student
works. He is also currently serving as Treasurer for the Frisco Community
Theatre.
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More information about this playwright is
coming soon
Web site:
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Brad
McEntire is a native-born Texan and the Artistic Director of the
small theatre outfit Audacity
Productions. He holds a B.F.A. in Theatre & Performance
Arts from the College of Santa Fe and is a M.A. Theatre candidate,
concentrating in playwriting, at TWU in Denton, Texas.
He's had several of his plays
produced locally (meaning around Dallas, Texas), as well as around
the United States. McEntire's a founding writer/performer of several
sketch/improv comedy troupes - Estranged Bedfellows (NM),
Molotov Cockroach (NYC), the recently defunct anarcho-theatrical
performance group
Mild Dementia, and now Fun
Dip (Dallas). Most recently, McEntire's taken to performing
with the long-form improv group The French Club Dropouts
and busies himself developing his abstracted solo improvisational
project
DRiBBLE FUNK
Web site:
www.dribblefunk.com
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Donald
McLaughlin is a playwright living
in Richardson, Texas. Having migrated from Oklahoma in 1983, he's
made Texas his new home, attending the University of Texas at
Dallas for his Bachelors of Arts & Humanities. An active
member of the North Texas theatre community, his produced works
include Four Chairs,
Something for Everyone,
Still on Foot,
Compilation, The Cask of Amontillado
(Adapted),
Picky, and The Smiling
Room (with Jen Massey).
He's had the pleasure of working with Audacity Productions
and Ground Zero Theatre and serves with great pride as Managing
Director of Wooden Spoon Theatre Company, a member of DFW
Playwrights Alliance and the board of Rover Dramawerks.
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Jen Massey studied creative writing at San
Francisco State University with Bridghe Mullins, Robert Barker and
Kent Nicholson. While living in San Francisco, she received staged
readings of her ten-minute and one-act plays, including The Detritus
Feeders and Prince Charles and the Man in the Moon. She
now resides in Dallas and is a member of DFW Playwrights' Alliance.
In 2004 she participated in FIT's playwriting workshop and had a
staged reading at the Bath House Cultural Center of her ten-minute
play, Things Break. She also wrote a ten-minute piece for
Rover Dramawerks' One-Day Only 24-hour Playwriting Festival entitled
Grab On. In October 2005, the full-length play she co-wrote
with Donald McLaughlin entitled, The Smiling Room, received
a staged reading at The Dallas HUB Theater. She is presently rewriting
The Smiling Room with Donald, and hopes 2006 will be an adventurous
and rewarding year. Jen hopes to have a web site up and running
by Summer 2006; stay tuned.
Contact Jen Massey here
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| Jo
Morello |
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Jo
Morello has been a writer since the age of 8. She also produced
summer stock for 3 years in Ohio in the late 70's--but never thought
of combining the two talents until she met and married playwright
Jack Gilhooley. He challenged her to try dramatic writing and she
won a national contest with her first attempt. Since that time, her
plays have won numerous competitions, honors and awards including
the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center Young People's Drama Project, Choate
Rosemary Hall Discovery Contest and three individual Artists Fellowships
and three Artists Enhancement Grants from Florida's Department of
State, Division of Cultural Affairs. Her show, The Crash
At Crush received a reading and workshop from Baylor
University and it's world premiere from the Dallas Hub Theater in
2008 where she became a resident playwright. She has also written
E.G.O. (A story of Eugene O'Neill) as well
as The Markham Mystery which are receiving
readings around the United States. She operates a public relations
firm in Sarasota, FL. |
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More information about this playwright is coming
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Web site:
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Allene Rasmussen Nichols lives in Arlington,
Texas. She teaches English
and drama at Gateway School in Arlington. Her plays have been produced in California, Dallas and New York. Her poems have been published in regional and international journals, including Illya’s Honey, Fait Accomplit, Sojourn, Philament, and Aries. Her poem "Voice" appears in Dance the Guns to Silence, an anthology honoring the late Ken Saro Wiwa.
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New playwright Cynthia Nichols lives works
and plays in the Dallas area. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she
made Dallas her home in 1996. She received her under grad degree
from Regis University; and has a background in business and marketing.
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Reg
Platt
is a writer, actor, director and producer who (except for two cold
years in Chicago) has lived in Dallas since 1978. He began
writing plays in the sixth grade and never looked back, with productions
in Dallas, Waxahachie, Boulder, CO and Norfolk, VA. In 1983-85,
Reg wrote, directed, and produced RidiculaDAC aka
Erratic Static, a ten-minute radio comedy show
on KNON-FM. His Short Play Pretty Boxes
was staged at Writers at Play 3 program in 2004 and was also presented
with Waiting for the Solstice as part of
"Read Our Shorts" staged readings. Waiting
for Chico was written and produced by Rover Dramawerks One
Day Only 5 and has had several shows as part of "Xmas at Ground
Zero". He appeared as Hercule Poirot in The Ambercrombie
Forgery and Sam Biscotti in A Biscotti Family Christmas
for Texas Radio Theater. He directed the 2005 National Film
Challenge Best of Central winner Strange Tastes, (written
by his lovely wife Susan McMath Platt) as well as Nude Eating
Hot Soup, currently in post-production and also written
by Susan. Several of his short videos have been presented
at the Dallas Video Festival and the Deep Ellum Film Festival, and
include The Missing Marx Brothers Film
(aka How to Build a Coocoo Clock,) Gina’s Music,
and Nosphönatu. His short play God’s
Dogs is cursed and has shut down several venues. Reg
is a former president of the Dallas Screenwriters Association, as
well as a member of S.T.A.G.E. and the Writers’ Garret. He
lives in east Dallas, where he does not raise ducks.
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Carol M. Rice has been involved in theatre
for over twenty years. She has worked with many regional theatres
in Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah as an actress, director, and playwright.
Carol is a co-founder of Rover Dramawerks (www.roverdramawerks.com),
currently serving as Artistic Director.
Carol performed in Bucket Productions’ Southwest
Premiere of Anne McGravie’s Wrens and is currently working
on a film version of the play with Ms. McGravie. Carol has directed
her own adaptation of The Three Musketeers, and her award-winning
melodrama The Belle of West Texas was included in the Mesquite
Theatre’s 1994 season. Most recently, her one-act, The Dancer,
was given a staged reading by Audacity Productions and was subsequently
produced at Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre’s New Plays Festival.
Other produced plays include Power Makes the World Go Around
and As the World Cooks. She has received awards in directing,
playwriting, and design.
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Isabella Russell-Ides, Playwright, Poet,
Performer, Producer.
In A God Box, Leonard's Car, Magdalene Mass, Getting Dangerously
Close to Myself, American Infidelity, American Avatar, Nashville
Road, Dharma Broads.
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Tim Shane is a native of Chicago but no stranger
to Dallas as he has been writing/producing/directing and performing
professionally since 1991. He is the founder and executive producer
of both Shane-Arts and the Dallas Hub Theater and has a successful
academic career in higher education as well with his most recent post
being an Assistant Dean at El Centro College. He has served on the
board of directors for the Dallas Theatre League where he was the
marketing chair and is a strong advocate for arts awareness. He has
been writing both stage and screen plays since he was 16 years old.
In 2005, he wrote 12 different shows that were produced in the DFW
area, and one in the NYC area. In 2006, he hosted a series of monthly
readings for the DFW Playwrights Alliance and began to produce the
DFW Fringe Festival advocating new and "fringy" works which
is still continuing today. He also wrote the Shakespearean Death
Match and a series of new commedia works for his company Commedia
dell'Carte. Between 2007 and 2008 he wrote an additional 8 works that
have been seen across the nation. Web site:
www.shane-arts.com
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Tom
Sime moved from journalism into playwriting and production
in 2005. Tom’s play All of the Above won the Peterson Emerging
Playwright Competition at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina,
and was produced there in 2006. All of the Above had its
professional premiere with Risk Theater Initiative, in association
with Tom’s company The Modern Stage in Dallas in 2007. The Modern
Stage teamed up with Joe & Sandi Black to produce workshops
of two of his plays in Dallas in Summer 2008: first the thriller
Bloodletters, then the comedy My Favorite Animal,
which met with sellout crowds and critical acclaim, and went on
to make its New York debut in November 2008 at the 45th Street Theatre
in Manhattan. Tom’s romantic comedy Klutz Theory won the
first annual Stage West Texas Playwriting Competition in 2007 and
was subsequently presented by the Fort Worth company as a staged
reading. Both Theatre of Note in Los Angeles and WingSpan Theatre
Company in Dallas recently presented staged readings of Bloodletters;
his one-act Sexy Commie was produced in the Outworks festival at
Louisiana State University in April 2007; his short play Queen
Bee Syndrome was produced by Theatre Inspirato in Toronto in
June 2007 and again by Pavement Theatre in Portland, Ore. In 2008;
and his short play Soon was produced by Austin Script Works in the
Out of Ink festival in April 2008. The one-act comedy Ex’s Exes
was produced by the Attic Theatre and Film Center in Los Angeles
in summer 2008. After 16 years as a theater critic and arts journalist,
ten of those at The Dallas Morning News, Tom became the managing
director of Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, an award-winning nonprofit
professional theater presenting a year-round season of comedies,
dramas and musicals. He is also a painter and sculptor represented
by Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York, where Tom moved in September
2008. In January 2009, Tom was named Writer in Residence at New
York’s Bleecker Street Theatre, where he will present a series of
staged readings of his full-length and one-act plays in February-March
2009, with notable guest actors including Deborah Harry and Everett
Quinton.
Web site: www.themodernstage.com
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Gary Swaim is a professor of graduate playwriting
seminars at the University of Texas at Dallas. A playwright, poet,
writer of fiction, and actor, he marks his home state as California
where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Philosophy
from the University of Redlands (in cooperation with Claremont Graduate
University). He was awarded the Minnie-Stevens Piper Professor by
the state of Texas for outstanding scholarly and academic achievement.
Web site:
www.garyswaim.com
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Jan Swart is a non-traditional student in her
senior year at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Her first play,
Stargirl was produced as the annual children's play at A&M-Commerce
and entered in the Kennedy Center Arts Theatre Festival. Jan continues
her playwriting education this year in an advanced playwriting course
taught by Jim Tyler Anderson, also a member of DFW Playwrights. Most
recently, Jan's 10-minute play Acapulco Gold has advanced in
the Kennedy Center Arts Theatre Festival and will be produced in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. Jan is also a member of the Dramatist Guild. |
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More information about this playwright is coming
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| Sylvia Riojas Vaughn |
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Sylvia Riojas Vaughn's poetry appeared in Texas Poetry Calendar 2009 (Dos Gatos Press,
Austin, TX). In 2008, her poems appeared in "Boundless," Anthology of the Rio
Grande Valley International Poetry Festival; and in "Poetry at Round Top,
2008," the anthology of the Round Top, TX, Poetry Festival. In 2008 she read her poems in McAllen, TX; Round Top, TX; Denton, TX; Benbrook, TX; and Dallas, TX.
In 2008 and 2009 she appeared with other members of the Dallas Poets Community
in panel discussions for English classes at Tarrant County College campuses and this year attended the Literary Festival at Richland College, Dallas, TX; and an intensive poetry workshop with Ralph Angel. I plan to attend the Round Top Poetry Festival this year.
Her play La Tamalada was presented in The 6th Annual Hispanic Playwrights' Festival in Fort Worth. Kit's Dreams was on a program of readings presented during The 6th Annual Festival of Independent Theatres in Dallas. La Piñata received a staged reading during The 3rd Annual Hispanic Playwrights' Festival in Fort Worth. She also belongs to Dallas Poets Community, and has had poems published in Texas Poetry Calendar 2009; Boundless 2008, the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival Anthology; Illya's Honey; Red River Review; and several small journals and anthologies.
She earned a degree in journalism from Southern Methodist University, and have worked as a journalist and as a certified English as a Second Language teacher. She also belongs to the Frisco Writers Group. |
| James Venhaus |
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James Venhaus’ plays include The Temple of
Dionysus (published by Playscripts, inc.), Weird Sisters,
Amy's Last Shift, and Underneath the Mistletoe, a collection of
10-minute holiday themed plays. His work has been performed by Ground Zero Theater Company, Audacity
Productions, Junior Players, Killing My Lobster (San Francisco),
Loyola University (New Orleans) and 13th Street Repertory Company (New
York City). He holds a B.F.A. in Theatre from Southwestern University
and a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Austin College.
Web site:
www.jamesvenhaus.net
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Don Zolidis is a playwright, screenwriter and
teacher living in Keller, but originally hailing from Wisconsin. His
most recent play, White Buffalo, received the 2004 Princess Grace
Award for playwriting and has been published by Samuel French, Inc. His
plays for teenagers have been produced in 25 states and 3 countries and
are available through
www.playscripts.com. His show, A Night Near the Sun opens in New
York in May 2006. Don enjoys the music of many bands.
Web site:
www.donzolidis.com
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