News and Updates

I'm excited to announce a reading of my new full length play, PARADISE KEY, coming up in exactly two weeks. It will be at the CMU School of Drama , on the third floor in the Brown Studio, on Wednesday, April 29th at 6:30 PM. No tickets are required, but you can contact me to learn more.

This past weekend I was in beautiful, blooming South Carolina for a few fun events. I was able to see the stage version of BRICK , based on the original film written and directed by Rian Johnson, at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville. It was adapted by my buddy Chris White, a phenomenal actor / teacher / director / writer / collaborator, and I heard that Rian's response to the piece was equal in excitement to mine. Well done, Chris! I was also able to hear a reading of a new play of mine that's still in development. It's about Zombies, and I'm working with some of my favorite all-time partners at Trustus Theatre in Columbia. This project has been simmering for a while, and will come to full boil with a guest artist / residency planned for later this summer in at The Studios of Key West , in Key West, Florida. We're taking the script through a development process down there, and hope to put on some readings / staged performances of it, and see what we've got. I...

A short tele-play that I wrote called CAFE UNDEAD will be shot tomorrow at the Pittsburgh Public TV affiliate WQED . This piece follows two survivors who find themselves trapped in a dead end situation. Things go from bad to worse when company arrives. UPDATE: Here are some great photos on Flickr from the shoot.

My 10-minute play, JOY OF COOKING, had a staged reading this week as part of the Actors Theatre of Santa Cruz "Best of the Rest" short play competition. JOY OF COOKING is the story of a woman who must learn to cook in one night, or risk losing her marriage and maybe her sanity.

holotype: (n) the original specimen which is used to describe a new species I was visiting my dinosaurs at the Carnegie Museum last week, and I ran across this great word. The museum has the original skeletons that defined the species Diplodocus carnageii , as well as the infamous Tyrannosaurus Rex . Their particular T-Rex was discovered in 1902 by Barnum Brown in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, and it toured the country, ending up at the Carnegie in the 1950's. Fossil hunting was a messy, wild-west business back in the day, full of shady dealers, each spinning out their own argument for why this skeleton was better than another. By chance (and perhaps more human intervention than we care to admit), a new species was created on those dry Montana plans. We forget that man names the animals. That "species" is just one more concept slapped on to the world in order to make sense of it. We love to label and taxonomize; and sometimes we come up with descriptions like ...

“ We always write the play we need to write, right now. There is always a reason for this play, and it's always because of something we are dealing with in our lives. Once you figure out what the play is dealing with, then make everything about that one thing. &#148 - Milan Stitt (1941 - 2009)

If you’re in the D.C. area in early March, you should come check out my short play MORAL SUPPORT at the historic Lincoln Theatre . They are presenting 5 works in their first annual “Emerging Voices Playwriting Competition,” and MORAL SUPPORT was selected to receive a staged reading by a professional cast. The event takes place on Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 7:00 PM, and you can reserve tickets by email: rsvp@thelincolntheatre.org .