March 2011, American Theatre
MFA Spotlight
CLEVELAND: It’s never too early to cultivate new local playwrights. This month, Cleveland Public Theatre inaugurates a three-week festival of new works written by graduating students from a consortium of four Ohio universities, with each workshop production staged by professional Cleveland actors, designers and directors. CPT’s academy-rooted collaboration, NEOMFA Playwrights Festival (the acronym stands for Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts), enlists creative writing grad students from Cleveland State University, Kent State University, University of Akron and Youngstown State University. “The main playwriting professor, Mike Geither, has had a long relationship with CPT,” notes executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan. “Many students had applied to our Little Box series, a traditional reading festival, and our Big Box series, which falls shy of full production but includes choreographers, performance artists, composers and music groups. But only a few of them had been selected.” NEOMFA focuses squarely on these student writers, premiering such works as Tom Hayes’s Patterns, about a young woman’s life as explored through myth, personal history, dressmaking and playmaking, staged by Brian Zoldessy; Michael Parsons’s Fire Dance, about two brother pursuing the same woman, directed by Jeremy Paul; and Jen Willoh’s The Pole, staged by Nina Dorrungue. See www.cptonline.org.
Re-printed with permission. From the March 2011 issue of American Theatre magazine, published by Theatre Communications Group: www.tcg.org/americantheatre
