Victory Gardens Theater announces Chicago One-Minute Play Festival

Apr 21, 2011
Victory Gardens Biograph Theater

Victory Gardens announces the 50 playwrights who will participate in The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival as a benefit for the Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed series. The event will be held in the Zacek-McVay Theater at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Park on May 15 and 16, 2011, at 7:30pm.

The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival will include VG Ensemble playwrights Lonnie Carter, Joel Drake Johnson, Nick Patricca, James Sherman. Participating playwrights who have been part of VG's IGNITION include Christopher DePaola, Kristoffer Diaz, Michael Golamco, Chisa Hutchinson, Leonard Madrid, Tanya Saracho, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Andrea Thome.

Other participating playwrights include Shepsu Aakhu, Usman Ally, Seth Bockley, Aaron Carter, David Cerda, Joshua Conkel, Randall Colburn, S.L. Daniels, Bilal Dardai, Philip Dawkins, Lisa Dillman, Zayd Dohrn, Mike Ervin, Wendell Etherly, Darna Lynn Formby, Andrew Gerle, Idris Goodwin, Stephen Louis Grush, Andrew Hinderaker, Reeny Hofrichter, Patricia Kane, Nambi E. Kelley, Laura Lacqmin, Evan Linder, Arlene Malinowski, Chelsea Marcantel, Patrick McLean, Mia McCullough, Jake Minton, Carlos Murillo, Brett Neveu, Justin Palmer, Caitlin Parrish, Emily Schwartz, Robert Tenges, Marisa Wegrzyn and Nick Zagone.

Directors include Megan Carney, Sydney Chatman, Brenda Didier, Julieanne Ehre, Andrew Hobgood, William Rogers, Brant Russell, Jeffry Stanton, Jaime Totti and Erica Weiss. The stage manager is Caty Mick. The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival is curated by Dominic D'Andrea and produced by Will Rogers.

One hundred, one-minute plays by 50 established and emerging playwrights will be commissioned for the two-night only event. A One-Minute Play is a form of theatre that looks at the ten-minute play form and structure, and distills it down to the most immediate story-telling event or core emotional content. The evening promises to be as quick as it is epic in its scope.

The One-Minute Play Festival was created in New York in 2007 by Dominic D'Andrea to promote the spirit of radical inclusion for writers of different age, gender, race, culture and point of career. The One-Minute play challenges the playwrights to expertly craft a theatrical moment. It requires a new sensibility to work in this deceptively small form.

"The sixty-second 'nano plays' have been very successful in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Brunswick, NJ and New York, where there is now an annual festival. Fresh Squeezed is thrilled to be working with Dominic to challenge our playwrights in this new form," says Fresh Squeezed Producer Will Rogers. "It's badass to have this many artists we admire working on one project, including artists at various points in their careers who have worked at our favorite theaters of all sizes, including Victory Gardens, Writers', Theater 7, Hell in a Handbag, Strange Tree, Chicago Dramatists, Neo-Futurists, The New Colony, About Face, Northwestern, DePaul, Young Chicago Authors, House, Redmoon, Collaboraction, Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna, XIII Pocket, UIC and Route 66, among many others."

The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival facilitates a community of playwrights, actors, directors, and community-at-large to participate in the challenge and creation of progressive short-form theatre. The festival is a true community-based event, and has a sense of both local and national position.

Playwright essays and comments about their experiences with the festival will be posted on a blog, www.oneminuteplays.wordpress.com.