Survival Jobs

Sep 01, 2018

Clockwise from left: Chris White, Arthur M. Jolly, Nicholas Dunn, Briandaniel Oglesby

Ah, the “survival” job. The term itself implies a person who will do almost anything for a pay check. I’ve had a few, but the worst came just after moving to a new city. It was a temp job in the underground level of an assembly plant: little more than a concrete bunker serving as a cavernous storage space for hundreds of legal boxes filled with files, memos, receipts, etc., a proverbial septic tank for bureaucratic waste. There was also a large industrial scanner/printer that rested beneath a single lightbulb like it was waiting to be interrogated.

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Nicholas Dunn

has written several plays for young audiences that were presented at Kingsbury Hall by the University of Utah Youth Theatre. His original play Viral debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2011. He works in the film industry as a script coordinator, most notably on HBO’s Mosaic, directed by Steven Soderbergh. He is a graduate of the University of Utah, and is working on his MFA at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Chris White

’s plays include Rhythms (Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play), Two-Character Play (dramatic centerpiece of Allyn & Bacon’s Explore Theatre), and Thespian (Smith & Krauss’ Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2011). Her novel The Life List of Adrian Mandrick was recently published by Touchstone Books.

Briandaniel Oglesby

received his MFA in Playwriting from UT-Austin. His plays for mature audiences include She Gets Naked in the End, Halfway, Nebraska, and Dogfuckers. His plays for teens include an adaptation of The Jungle Book and a gay re-imagination of Romeo & Juliet for middle schoolers.

Arthur M. Jolly

has penned over 60 produced plays. Screenwriter: Where We Disappear and Under the Same Sky. Woodward/Newman Award finalist for A Gulag Mouse, Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award for The Lady Demands Satisfaction. Three-time Joining Sword and Pen winner, Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Repped by Brant Rose Agency.

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