Suggestions for Staged Readings

Sep 01, 2018

Holli Harms, Susan Westfall, Jennifer Maisel, T.D. Mitchell, Mark Friedman

Most often you have a day of “rehearsal” or only a few hours prior to audience arrival. It’s a waste of everyone’s time if we fail to work together and fail to give 100%. I know I speak for many playwrights who have sat helpless in the audience and watched a reading of theirs go from bad to worse and have contemplated getting up and playing all the parts themselves. “Why not?” we think. We’ve already done it. We sit at home, at our desks, or tables, or windows and we do the play, acting out all the parts. We do it. So why not do it in front of an audience? Because we really don’t want to AND that’s crazy!

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Holli Harms

is a member of Dramatists Guild, Ensemble Studio Theatre, on the board of Women In the Arts and Media Coalition, and a contributing writer with Verbal Supply Company, Monologues And Madness, and reviewer with Front Row Center. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.

Susan Westfall

is the co-founder and Literary Director of City Theatre in Miami, FL. Her plays include Two Weekends and A Day, Look At Me, Rats, The Boy From Russia, Uprising, The Wedding Party, Passing Through, With the Patience of Angels, 1962, You Are Here, and Voices at the Mary Elizabeth Hotel. Her one-minute play, Tango, has been adapted as a ten-minute play: Feel The Tango, a political short: Be The Change, and debuts as Tango! a mini opera in Santa Fe. She’s a member of the Dramatists Guild, The Playwrights Center, Theatre Communications Group, and the South Florida Theatre League. A rare native Miamian, she lives with her husband on the island of Key Biscayne.

Jennifer Maisel

: Out Of Orbit made the 2016 Kilroy List, won the 2017-18 Woodward Newman award for Drama, and premiered at Williamston Theatre and Bloomington Playwrights Project in 2018. There Or Here opened in London in January. Other plays include @thespeedofJake, The Last Seder, Eight Nights, and Match. Jennifer also writes for film and television.

T.D. Mitchell

’s latest, VRTU-L, was recently workshopped at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. VRTU-L is a darkly comic, absurdist multimedia play exposing the disorienting relationship between psychology, persuasive tech, the internet gaming industry, and the military. A Yaddo alum, her next artist’s fellowship is at VCCA later this fall, where she’s writing a new play.

Mark Friedman

is the playwright, composer, and lyricist—along with Janet Yates Vogt—of musicals that have played across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Asia. They include: Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical, How I Became a Pirate, Rapunzel! Rapunzel! A Very Hairy Fairy Tale, Anne of Green Gables, Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Crown Jewel – among others. His newest work is a musical look at infamous bootlegger George Remus. Represented by Paradigm Talent Agency, his works are licensed by Theatrical Rights Worldwide and Rodgers & Hammerstein.