This year, Essential Theatre celebrates the 25th anniversary of its flagship annual event, the Essential Theatre Play Festival.
With focused support and resources for new original work by Georgia playwrights, the festival has helped to launch the careers of some of today’s most renowned American theater creators, including Lauren Gunderson. Although Lauren is now a nationally performed playwright, she submitted her first play, “Parts They Call Deep,” to the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award at age 18 in 2001, the festival’s inaugural year.
The Festival continues to receive higher volumes of play submissions as the years go on, which Essential Theatre Artistic Director Peter Hardy attributes to the accessibility of the submission process. There is no fee associated with dropping a play into their process, and they encourage new playwrights to submit work without any preexisting relationship with the community.
The Essential Theatre also does a live play reading series called the “Bare Essentials.” According to Managing Director Jennifer Kimball, the live series provides “the benefits of having a public play reading that is not just in your living room or in your head — hearing how other people receive your play, both the people presenting your characters, as well as the audience meeting them for the first time.”
A busy performance schedule kicks off Aug. 9, continuing through Sept. 1. Kimball and Hardy joined Lois Reitzes on “City Lights” to discuss their upcoming schedule and what play fans can expect in the upcoming year.
