A Weekly Collaborative Writing & Performance Series for ALL!
ABOUT OTP's COMMUNITY WRITE
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Lead by OTP Core Members Alexandra Smith, Cathy Messier, and Sarah Jacobs, OTP's COMMUNITY WRITE unites some of OTP's favorite Playwrights with YOU, our community, to create something new and uplifting every week.
Each week we will feature an OTP Playwright who will select writing prompts from YOUR suggestions. Playwrights and members of our community will write short, 1-2 minute pieces, and then our featured Playwright will choose some of their favorites for OTP Actors to perform digitally. Through this series, we are excited to share your voice while celebrating our collaborative spirit before eventually bringing these writings to our stage later this year.
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UPDATE: Our current session of Community Write has Come to a close, check in soon for updates!
HOW IT WORKS
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Our Community has helped us collect a wide range of topics & prompts, see the word cloud below!
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Each Monday, a featured playwright will select 1-2 topics from that list to inspire their own writing and will share their topic selections via a short video posted on OTP’s Facebook & Instagram. Between then and Friday, the playwright will write something totally new and original based on those inspirations.
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And we want YOU to write, too! Based on the playwright’s selected inspirations of the week, we want you to express yourself in whatever written form suits you: A monologue, poem, short story, mantra, rhyme--as long as it’s a page or less and takes less than 2 minutes to read out loud. We’ll post a Google form where you can submit your work.
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Our featured playwright’s work and their favorite submissions from the community will be given to OTP actors to perform.
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On Sunday, we will post videos of the actors performing that week’s creations.
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Over the next several weeks, we’ll repeat the whole process over again with new playwrights from the OTP family.
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Submitted something that didn’t get performed? Don’t worry! We’re planning an event later in the year to showcase as many of the pieces of work created through this project as we can!
Submission Information
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Coming Soon
We can’t wait to create with you!
WEEK 6 PERFORMANCES
“Seedlings & Sidewalk Chalk”
WEEK 5 PERFORMANCES
“Hearts Taped to Window Panes & Sounds Previously Unnoticed”
WEEK 4 PERFORMANCES
"Opening Our Windows & Turning Inward"
WEEK 3 PERFORMANCES
"(Mis)communication & New Rituals"
WEEK 2 PERFORMANCES
"Stillness & Fried Chicken"
WEEK 1 PERFORMANCES
"Through the Body & Spells"
TOPIC & PROMPT WORD CLOUD
MEET OUR FEATURED PLAYWRIGHTS
Andrew Siañez-De La O - Week 6
Andrew Siañez-De La O is a Boston based Mexican-American playwright from El Paso,Texas. He is currently a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, supported by the Stanford Calderwood Fund for New American Plays, at the Huntington Theatre Company, Boston Massachusetts. His work has been developed with support from The Playwrights Realm, Pipeline Theatre Company, Company One, Echo Theatre Company, and the Writers Room of Boston. He writes for the Latinx Children’s Fiction podcast, “Timestorm,” with Cocotazo Media.
Thom Dunn- Week 5
Thom Dunn's plays have has been performed or read across the country, from Boston to Hollywood to Valdez, Alaska; he has also written three novels and published short fiction, poetry, and comics in Asimov's, Serial Pulp Magazine, and others. He is currently a staff writer for the New York Times' Wirecutter site and a regular contributor to BoingBoing.net, as well as the guitarist / singer in a rock band called the Roland High Life. A graduate of Emerson College and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Thom enjoys mythophysics, robots and whiskey, and Oxford commas, and firmly believes that Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” is the single greatest atrocity ever committed against mankind. thomdunn.net
Kristen Palmer- Week 4
KRISTEN PALMER (she/her/hers) writes plays, makes theater and teaches kids and adults. She started writing plays in Seattle, WA while working with Printer's Devil Theater in the 90s. From there she moved on to NYC where she had the great good fortune to connect with Pataphysics at the Flea, New Georges, Soho Rep, P73, Clubbed Thumb, Women's Project, and FLUX theater. All spaces committed to the weird, true and wonderful. She also met her future husband, playwright Adam Szymkowicz. After bouncing around the country, Atlanta to New England to Brooklyn, she completed an MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College, studying with the galvanizingly magical Tina Howe and the particularly clarifying Mark Bly.
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In 2013 she became a mother to Wallace and began her tenure as Artistic Director of Oddfellows Playhouse Youth Theater in Middletown, CT. While there she directed, produced and taught theater with young people, particularly focusing on engaging low-income youth. After a short stint as Executive Artistic Director she resigned in 2018, continuing to contribute to the Playhouse’s on-going vitality. She is currently a part-time faculty member of the CCSU Theater Department. She and her family live in southeast CT with a grumpy cat named Skeezer.
Nick Malakhow- Week 3
Nick Malakhow (he/him/his) is a Boston-based writer and theater educator. His full-length play, SEEING EYE, was developed with Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and Fresh Ink in Boston, and was a finalist for the 2019 O'Neill NPC and the 2018 LTC/HowlRound Carnaval. His other work has been developed or produced by Theatre@First, the Open Theatre Project, the Q Collective, and as part of the 2018 Boston Theater Marathon. Nick was a Company One Playlab Unit member for C1's 2019 season. He has also taught theater, English, and creative writing at the secondary level for over ten years in the greater Philly and Boston areas. He grew up in the diverse town of Teaneck, New Jersey, the child of Dominican and Ukrainian parents. BA: Swarthmore College, MA: Emerson College
Christina R. Chan - Week 2
Christina R Chan (she/her/hers) is a playwright, actor and producer. She is a member of Screen Actors’ Guild and is Actors’ Equity Eligible. Her work uses historical facts, interviews and biographical material to explore the Asian American immigrant experience. Her first full length play was an O'Neill NPC Semifinalist. She was a Company One Theater Playwright Fellow. Her plays have been produced/developed/workshopped by Company One Theater, TC Squared Theater, The Boston Theater Marathon's Warm Up Lap of full length reading, Boston Center for the Arts, Fresh Ink, The Cambridge MultiCultural Arts Center, The Museum of Fine Arts and ArtsEmerson.
Christina is a multiply awardee of The Boston Foundations' LAB grant: Two for her own work and one as the lead artist for the Asian American Playwright Collective/AAPC. She is a co-founding member of the AAPC.
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Her work is in The Asian American Playwright Collective's Anthology, Volumes I & II, published by in vivo Ink. She attended Trinity Rep Conservatory, RI and the Royal National Theater, London, UK.
Michael John Ciszewski - Week 1
Michael John (he/him/his) started telling stories to entertain and/or mislead his big, loud, Greek family to his desired effect while growing up in Northern New Jersey and hasn't stopped since.
His debut solo show EVERYONE IS DYING AND SO AM I will receive its first full production, directed by Sarah Gazdowicz and Tyler Prendergast, with Open Theatre Project in autumn 2020! Following development with Open Theatre Project throughout Spring/Summer 2019, EVERYONE IS DYING received a premiere, sold-out workshop performance in Boston in September 2019.
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He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and is a proud graduate of Boston University’s B.F.A. Theatre Arts program. Find him making all sorts of silly little things @micjcis wherever social media happens.
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