A Little Stream Growing Wider as it Heads Toward the Sea
WHO: Kathleen Cahill, playwright
WHAT: “Charm,” a play about Margaret Fuller and Her Friends
WHERE: Weber State University Department of Performing Arts
WHEN: October 5-13
Kathleen Cahill has been a playwright in residence at Salt Lake Acting Company for the last two years and the team has produced very exciting new works. Her play, “Charm,” premiered at SLAC in 2010 and also won the Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award. A New England transplant, Cahill appears to be thriving in a city on the lip of the Great Basin.
from her SLAC blog http://www.saltlakeactingcompany.org/playwrights/resident-playwright/playwright-kathleen-cahill: As I recall, I was first noticed as writer when I penned the immortal phrase, “tender pillows of ravioli” for a restaurant in Massachusetts. . . .I wrote a children’s play. . . . I wrote a couple of radio plays and. . . sold them both to the CBC. I wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, little monologues about famous composers, and I wrote some short stories. I wrote a couple of screenplays, and sold one of them to Public Television. My first play . . .workshopped at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, and was produced by the University of Oklahoma where I was Artist in Residence. My second play. . . was produced off Broadway, and then in Chicago, and was made into a radio play for NPR. The Massachusetts Artists Foundation gave me an award for a play called DITCHED. Someone hired me to turn it into a screenplay, and the money allowed my husband and me to make the down payment on our first house. A play called THE STILL TIME was produced in Chicago and received the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Playwrighting award.
I was given a scholarship to NYU Tisch School for the Arts in Musical Theatre. I wrote the libretto for CLARA, an opera about Clara Schumann, and received a Rockefeller Grant to Bellagio Italy to work on it with the composer. . . .I wrote DAKOTA SKY that received the Jane Chambers Playwrighting Award. . . .North Shore Music Theatre commissioned me to write a musical . . .which was performed at the Berkley College of Music in Boston.
Then I came to Utah and had brain surgery. My life changed. There were mountains and sky and something in the air (besides pollution I mean.) I wrote a play in Utah that I had wanted to write for years, about Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalists: CHARM received it’s world premiere at the Salt Lake Acting Company. It received an Edgerton Award; it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. THE PERSIAN QUARTER premiered at the Salt Lake Acting Company and received another Edgerton Award. It opens the season at Merrimack Rep in Massachusetts in September 2011. I’m a member of a great playwrighting group here in Salt Lake. I see my career as a playwright like this: a little stream growing bigger and wider as it heads towards the “far and boundless sea” to steal a quote from one of my own plays.
Awards: Jane Chambers Playwrighting Award; Connecticut Commission on the Arts Playwrighting Award (twice) Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award; Rockefeller Grant; National Endowment for the Arts New American Works Grant;, Edgerton Foundation Award (twice) Drama League Award.
Musicals: The Navigator, Friendship of the Sea; Dakota Sky, an opera, Clara, two opera/cabarets, Fatal Song, and A Tale of Two Cities: Paris and Berlin in the Twenties. Listed in the top 25 songwriters in the Directory of Musical Theatre Writers.
Plays: Course 86B in the Catalogue (Salt Lake Acting Company) The Still Time (Georgia Rep/ Porchlight Theatre, Chicago) Women Who Love Science Too Much (Porchlight Theatre and NPR Radio) Henri Louise and Henry (Cleveland Public, Firehouse Theatre, Massachusetts) Charm ( National New Play Network Festival, Salt Lake Acting Company premiere, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Dallas; Orlando Shakespeare) The Persian Quarter ( Salt Lake Acting Company, Merrimack Rep, Massachusetts.) Downtown Express (Screenplay, produced by David Grubin Productions. )
Works as Senior Editor, Masterpiece, WGBH-TV. • contact: kathleencahill10@comcast.net
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