May 2006

A Playful Performance

In what promises to be a lively and engaging evening of informal theater, four MacDowell playwrights-in-residence will present their work at the finale of the fourth season of MacDowell Downtown. Honor Molloy, Charles Morey, Rich Orloff, and Julia Pearlstein will offer a collaborative reading and performance of three comedic scenes excerpted from full-length plays and one dramatic monologue.

A third-generation actor and playmaker, Molloy will read her self-contained monologue “Ache of Love.” The piece is based on testimony by Molloy’s grandaunt, who witnessed the 1916 rebellion in Dublin, Ireland, known as Easter Rising. Molloy has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard/Radcliffe and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Her plays have been produced and developed by A.S.K. at Lincoln Center Theater, London’s Royal Court Theatre, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Sydney’s Annual Mardi Gras Arts Festival, and Ireland’s Inishbofin Arts Festival, among others.

Morey will present his play “Laughing Stock,” a sentimental farce about a summer stock theater that is based on his experiences at the Peterborough Players. Morey, who started his career as an actor at the Players and was also the artistic director there from 1977-1988, is currently the artistic director of the Pioneer Theatre Company at the University of Utah. He and Orloff will read the first scene from “Laughing Stock,” which was nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award in 2001, and received the New Hampshire Theatre Association’s Best Original Play Award in 2004 for its production at the Players.

Morey and Pearlstein will play husband and wife in Orloff’s “Brazilian Wax Eloquent.” A short comedy about a long-married couple’s invigorating vacation to Rio, the piece is part of Orloff’s full-length work titled “Foreign Affairs,” a series of seven comedies about international sex, religion, and politics that was produced at WorkShop Theater Company’s Mainstage in New York last year. Orloff is the author of 10 full-length plays and more than 60 one-act and short plays, which have been produced around the world. His work has appeared four times in “Best American Short Plays,” and has garnered many awards, including the Pickering Award for Playwriting Excellence, the Abeles Foundation Playwrights Award, and the Playwrights First Award.

Pearlstein will stage a fanciful comedy titled “SWARF/A Lamentation of Swans,” which was worked on during, and influenced by, her previous residency at MacDowell in 2003. A multimedia play with songs, “SWARF” is set in a toy factory where time and space bend and twist according to the whims of radioactive ghosts who inhabit the premises. Pearlstein, who attended clown theatre at Mimo Teatro Movimento in Rome, has a B.A. from Yale in Theater Studies and is a graduate of the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University. She was a finalist for the Julie Harris Playwriting Award in 2001 for “PLINKO!,” her first full-length play.