Great Plains Theatre Conference
Great Plains Theatre Conference
Saturday, May 28 – Saturday, June 4
Metropolitan Community College, Fort Omaha Campus and various venues
mccneb.edu/theatreconference
If all the world is a stage and vice versa, then it is fair to say some of the world’s greatest masterminds are gathering in Omaha this week. The Great Plains Theatre Conference is in exceptional form this year, as the local theater community welcomes some of the country’s most stellar contemporary playwrights for the sixth annual week of workshops, insight, performance and play.
The conference has quickly grown into a well-recognized national playwright event over the last six years. More than 200 local volunteers have prepared to host the hundreds of people who will come for the week’s events.
The week’s worth of workshops, luncheons and performances will take place again at Metro Community College’s Fort Omaha campus. The workshops and other daily activities will take place this Saturday through next Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day, and are open to the public.
This year, over 400 playwrights from around the country submitted scripts for consideration to be featured in the week-long conference. From the large pool of applicants, 35 scripts were selected as the subjects of the daily workshops. Five of the 35 selected scripts will be featured and performed on the main stage of the conference at Metro Community College, starting Tuesday.
“We hire professional playwrights from across the country” said Kevin Lawler, general director of the Great Plains Theatre Conference, about the judging process. “Each playwright reads 35 scripts,” he said. “We open the submission process on Sept. 1,” he said, “and we try to have them chosen by March 15.
“You get a little cross-eyed after doing it all, but there is really nothing more exciting theatrically than when you read a script that is amazing and it’s never been done before.” Lawler began his involvement with the conference as an actor, and then a playwright before becoming director of the week-long theater festival.
In addition to the daily conference offerings, several star-studded evening performances will be staged at various venues around Omaha. With workshops all day and performances and receptions every evening, Lawler says a very festive energy has developed around the conference.
“The people are usually quite strange and brilliant and funny kind of people who come,” said Lawler “there’s a lot interesting things that go down.”
Some of the most brilliant GPTC participants are the featured guest playwrights. Lee Blessing, this year’s honored guest playwright, will speak Wednesday evening at KANEKO in a panel discussion with other playwrights, before presenting his plays, “Fortinbras” and “A Walk in the Woods” on Thursday and Friday nights at Creighton University’s Lied Center.
“A Walk in the Woods,” probably Blessing’s most famous work, was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony award. The cold war story was produced from Broadway to London’s West End, but is just one of dozens of Blessing’s plays produced to critical and popular acclaim.
“Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues” by Caridad Svich kicks off the evening performances on Sunday night at the Weber Fine Arts Building on the University of Nebraska at Omaha campus. This play creates “a place where lovers search for each other across a landscape of sweat, sex, fried chicken and whiskey,” according to one conference description.
Many GPTC attendees and stars will gather downtown in the Old Market Saturday night to kick off the week’s activity, said Lawler. The Witching Hour will host an avant garde performance at Nomad Lounge at 7:30 p.m. Saturday evening to get the creative juices flowing.
“After every evening show, there is a reception, where attendees and presenters really get to connect,” said Lawler. “And every lunch time, here at the Fort campus, there is a lunchtime panel and lecture. That is a huge time when people hang out and converse.”
“The most exciting thing is all the work that happens, the other is the interaction between everybody,” said Lawler. “There are so many communities. It’s this giant theatrical mosh pit with people from all over Omaha, and from all over nationally…Omaha right now is going through an incredible blossoming in the arts. It’s a very rare, cool time to be in a city when this is happening.”
Below you will find a schedule of the evening performances. For a complete schedule of workshops and more information, visit mccneb.edu/theatreconference.
Great Plains Theatre Conference PlayFest 2011
“Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues” by Caridad Svich
University of Nebraska at Omaha, Weber Fine Arts Building, 6001 Dodge St.
7:30 p.m., Sunday, May 29
Adults $15; Seniors/Students/TAG members $10
Enter into a world of ghosts, love and war where women smoke cigars and sing to help the dead. A sensuous exploration of an America caught in two wars and struggling to reconcile the visible and invisible consequences to ourselves and our country.
Le Chat Noir
Holland Performing Arts Center, Scott Recital Hall, 1200 Douglas St.
7:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 31
Adults $15; Seniors/Students/TAG members $10
The Great Plains Theatre Conference presents Le Chat Noir (French for “The Black Cat”), a raucous evening of short monologues and plays by Constance Congdon, Sibyl Kempson, Courtney Mault, David Neumann, Thomas Riccio, Timothy Siragusa, Max Sparber and Lee Wochner.
The Writer’s Voice
KANEKO, The Bow Truss Building, 1111 Jones St.
7:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 1
Adults $15; Seniors/Students/TAG members $10
What are the stories behind the plays that are penned by our great contemporary playwrights? Where do their ideas come from? How do they come to fruition? Major American playwrights Lee Blessing, Constance Congdon, Caridad Svich and Mac Wellman read and discuss selections from their own award-winning work.
“Fortinbras” by Lee Blessing
Creighton University, Lied Center for the Arts, 2500 California Plaza
7:30 p.m., Thursday, June 2
Adults $15; Seniors/Students/TAG members $10
What happens after Hamlet dies in the world’s most famous play? Randy ghosts hit on the living, the Norwegian army randomly invades Europe and a senate ethics committee in this hilarious satire of power and spin that seems to be ripped straight from today’s headlines.
“A Walk in the Woods” by Lee Blessing
Creighton University, Lied Education Center for the Arts, 2500 California Plaza
7:30 p.m., Thursday, June 2
Adults $15; Seniors/Students/TAG members $10
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, this brilliant, wonderfully funny study of human nature follows a Russian and American nuclear arms negotiator as they meet in the woods outside of Geneva, Switzerland, and struggle to find common ground while the fate of the world rests in their hands.