American Political Plays after 9/11: #REF!

Contributors

279 CONTRIBUTORS Kia Corthron’s plays include Moot the Messenger (Actors Theatre of Louisville ’s Humana Festival), Light Raise the Roof (New York Theatre Workshop ), Snapshot Silhouette (Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre), Slide Glide the Slippery Slope (Actors Theatre of Louisville, Humana, Mark Taper Forum), The Venus de Milo Is Armed (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), Breath, Boom (London’s Royal Court Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre, and elsewhere), Force Continuum (Atlantic Theater Company), Splash Hatch on the E Going Down (New York Stage and Film, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Yale Rep, London’s Donmar Warehouse), Seeking the Genesis (Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club), Digging Eleven (Hartford Stage Company), Life by Asphyxiation (Playwrights Horizons), Wake Up Lou Riser (Delaware Theatre Company ), Come Down Burning (American Place Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre), and Cage Rhythm (Sightlines/The Point in the Bronx). Awards include the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Residency (Italy), Playwrights Center’s McKnight National Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts, Barbara Barondess MacLean Foundation Award, AT&T On Stage Award, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, Mark Taper Forum’s Fadiman Award, National Endowment for the Arts/TCG, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Callaway Award, Connections Contest winner, and in television a Writers Guild Outstanding Drama Series Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Wire. She has developed work through the Hermitage Artists Retreat, Norton Island retreat, Sundance retreat at Ucross, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Women’s Playwrights Festival in Seattle, Hedgebrook retreat, Shenandoah International Playwrights Retreat, and elsewhere. She traveled to Liberia in 2004 under the auspices of the Guthrie Theater’s Bush Foundation grant, inspiring her to write Tap the Leopard. Corthron is an elected member of the Dramatists Guild Council, a member of the Writers Guild of America, and an alumna of New Dramatists. +DYLV&RQWULEVLQGG 30 Contributors 280 Yussef El Guindi won the 2009 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for an emerging playwright. His most recent productions include Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes, produced by Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, and Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat, produced by Silk Road Theatre Project in Chicago, where it was Jeff-nominated. The play that is part of the current volume is Back of the Throat, winner of the 2004 Northwest Playwrights’ Competition held by Theater Schmeater. It won L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award for 2006, was nominated for the 2006 American Theater Critics Association’s Harold and Mimi Steinberg / ACTA New Play Award, and was voted Best New Play of 2005 by the Seattle Times. It was first staged by San Francisco’s Thick Description and Golden Thread Productions; and later presented in various theaters around the country, including The Flea Theater in New York. Another play of his, Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith, staged by Silk Road Theatre Project, won the After Dark Award for Best New Play in Chicago in 2006. His two-related one-acts, Acts of Desire, were staged by the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles. Back of the Throat and the tworelated one-acts, now titled Such a Beautiful Voice Is Sayeda’s and Karima’s City, were published by Dramatists Play Service. The latter one-acts are also included in The Best American Short Plays: 2004–2005. His play Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith is to be included in Salaam/Peace: An Anthology of Middle-Eastern-American Playwrights, was published in 2009. Yussef holds an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and was playwright-in-residence at Duke University. Allan Havis has had his plays produced at theaters across the country and in Europe, including San Diego Repertory, Old Globe, Vox Nova, Seattle’s ACT, Odyssey, Long Wharf, South Coast Rep, American Repertory Theatre , Hartford Stage, Virginia Stage, WPA, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Trapdoor Theatre, Coral Gable’s New Theatre, Interact Theatre, Philadelphia Theatre Company, and Rowholt Theater-Verlag (National German Radio). Works have been commissioned by England’s Chichester Festival, Sundance, San Diego Rep, Ted Danson’s Anasazi Productions, South Coast Rep, Mixed Blood, CSC Rep, Malashock Dance, Carolina Chamber Chorale , National Foundation for Jewish Culture, University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University. Fifteen full-length published plays include Morocco, Hospitality, and The Haunting of Jim Crow. His published books include the edited volume American Political Plays, the children’s novel Albert the Astronomer, and a book on ninety years...