RAT come to PlayLabs

["Megan Monaghan" <meganmonaghan@email.msn.com>]

Greetings, RATs --

I have the opportunity to offer round-trip plane tickets to four or five
artistic
directors or literary managers of small theater companies, who are looking
for new plays and playwrights.  The occasion is PlayLabs, the Playwrights'
Center's national play development festival.  Every year PlayLabs brings
several of the nation's most interesting dramatists (this year, Fiona
Templeton (NYC), Carson Grace Becker (Chicago) and Victor Lodato (Tucson))
to the Twin Cities for two weeks of intensive playwright-guided work on
their new pieces.  At the end, we open the doors and invite an audience in
to see where the plays are in their development.

This chance to bring in out-of-town artistic directors/literary managers
works thusly:

You send me an email at meganmonaghan@msn.com, telling me briefly about your
company and why you're looking for new plays/writers at this time.  I need
to receive these emails by Monday, July 17.  We're looking for aesthetic and
geographic diversity, and a serious desire to connect with new plays and
playwrights *now*.

I choose four or five people and notify them.  We buy your plane ticket; you
handle your housing, food and in-town transportation by hook or by crook.

We bring you in on Thursday, August 3.  Thursday night you participate in a
panel at The Playwrights' Center, where you'll discuss your companies, what
you are and are not looking for in new plays/writers, and your submission
processes.  There will be an opportunity to pick up cover letters, synopses
and dialogue samples from Center writers at that time.

On August 4 and 5, you attend the public presentations of the three PlayLabs
plays as our guests.  The plays are:

-- Carson Grace Becker, "The Erotic Life of Property," recently given a
reading by Moving Arts in L.A.  The oldest profession meets the newest
technology, and the tangle is enriched by two young people preparing to take
flight into the world.  The arrival of a stranger catalyzes the members of a
little created "family" to begin their separate journeys.

-- Victor Lodato, "The Mystery School."  Nine-year-old twins Zelda and Margo
survive Dr. Josef Mengele's famous Auschwitz study of twins, then must deal
(or not) with the legacy of death and loss so early in their lives.
Organized by dream logic, this play explores the way reliability shifts when
we use the memory of the heart.

-- Fiona Templeton, "The Medead."  Fiona is revisiting the Medea myths of
Greece and the Middle East in an ensemble piece for ten performers -- five
women who play Medea at different points in her life, and five men who play
the male characters on whom her life had an impact.  Dense, musical,
piercing and mysterious, this is unlike any Medea you've seen before.

On August 6, we send you home.

If you have questions, please don't hesitate to call me at the Center at
(612) 332-7481, ext. 21.  If you're interested in this opportunity, please
email me at meganmonaghan@msn.com, not on the RAT list.  Please also
publicize as widely as you wish elsewhere -- Mitchell or someone in L.A., if
you'd put it on the BCT list I'd appreciate it.  Thanks!

Megan
Mpls.