The playwrights

STEPHANIE CARLSON: An actor by trade and co-founder of Passport Theatre Company, Stephanie joined the Northampton Playwrights Lab in 2012, originally showing up as a reader and then staying on as a writer. Her recent plays, Seamonster and Pleasure Cruise, were both performed at previous Play By Play Festivals. Her one-act play, Have You Seen Charlie, has been performed at the Double Take Fringe and GCC’s Locally Grown Festival. Stephanie has worked with many local theatres, including the Hanover Theatre, New Century Theatre, Majestic Theater and Silverthorne Theater. She periodically performs with Passport Theatre in Helsinki, Finland, and in fall of 2021 performed in back-to-back productions of Educating Rita and Small Mouth Sounds. In 2019 she co-directed The Magic Flute at UMass Opera Workshop. Stephanie is a graduate of Hampshire College. She is a member of the Play Incubation Collective and a longtime member of Actors Equity Association. stephcarlson.com

MERYL COHN’s playwriting awards include: The ATHE Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (The Siegels of Montauk); Massachusetts Cultural Council Playwriting Award finalist (Naked with Fruit); O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semifinalist, twice (And Sophie Comes Too, and Reasons to Live); Lark New Play semifinalist (And Sophie Comes Too); Jane Chambers Playwriting Award semifinalist (The Final Say); The 2015 Eventide Arts Theater Award (The Final Say); and Curve magazine’s Lesbian Theater Award. Reasons to Live was named a Favorite Play by The Cape Cod Times. Eight of her plays have been commissioned and produced by The Provincetown Theater. Her work has also been produced or developed at The Skylight Theatre; The Open Fist Theatre; TOSOS; The N.Y. International Fringe Festival (extended into The Encore Series); The Cherry Pit; W.H.A.T. (Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater); The Soho Playhouse; Counter Production; The Road Theatre; Boston Playwrights Theater; and Smith College, among others. She earned her MFA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Play publications include The Siegels of Montauk and Best Women’s Stage Plays and Monologues, 2010, Smith & Kraus. She is the author of a long-time advice column and of the humor book DO WHAT I SAY: MS. BEHAVIOR’S GUIDE TO GAY AND LESBIAN ETIQUETTE, published by Houghton Mifflin. She founded the Northampton Playwrights Lab in 2006, and is a member of The Truro Playwright Collective, TOSOS, and a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. www.merylcohn.com

HARLEY ERDMAN is a dramaturg, playwright, and scholar whose work focuses on adaptation and translation. His commissioned work as a translator of contemporary Latin American theater includes plays from Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. His Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain (ITER, 2016) features his translations of ten plays, for the first time ever in English. It won the Josephine Roberts Award for best scholarly edition in the field of early modern women and gender. He is the author or editor of six other books and a winner of the Association for Hispanic Classic Theater’s Translation Prize. His dramatic writing projects focus on rebels and outsiders in local history. These include the opera librettos The Scarlet Professor (2017) and The Garden of Martyrs (2013), both with composer Eric Sawyer; and the screwball comedy Nobody’s Girl, which debuted at the Northampton Academy of Music in 2014. Recent works include the cabaret My Evil Twin (2002), with Sawyer; and the original musical the birds the birds, the birds, currently in development with composer Gregory Boover and director Gina Kaufmann. Erdman is a Professor of Theater at UMass/Amherst. www.harleyerdman.com

LEANNA JAMES BLACKWELL is a theatre artist, writer, and professor. She is the former associate artistic director of The Inner Stage in Berkeley, California, and artistic director and resident playwright of TKO Theater, a performing company producing original plays based on company members’ stories of addiction and recovery. Her full-length plays have been presented in theatres in California, Nevada, Mexico, and locally at Silverthorne Theatre, Berkshire Theatre Company, and The Northampton Center for the Arts. They include New Soul, a drama about race and adoption; Grimm Women, a feminist retelling of fairy tales that imagines the hidden stories of the witches and stepmothers;Curtain Call, a comedy about actors, death, and adultery; The Wendy Chronicles, a devised theatre piece based on the life and work of Wendy Wasserstein; and the documentary plays TKO I, II,III, and IV and Voices of the Other. She is an associate professor of creative writing and the former director of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Narrative Medicine program at Bay Path University; the founding editor of Multiplicity Magazine; and the author of numerous published essays and stories about parenting, mental health, addiction, race, and class. Her essays and stories have been featured in True Story, Full Grown People, Hidden Manna, Literary Mama, Brain/Child, Amherst and Mount Holyoke magazines, and in the literary anthologies A Ghost at Heart’s Edge and Toddler. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Ardella Mills and Vermont Studio Center fellowship winner, a Glimmer Train finalist, and the recipient of the Innovation in Teaching Award from Bay Path. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Mills College, a secondary teaching credential in drama and English from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. in drama from U.C. Irvine. She is a 15-year member of the Northampton Playwrights Lab.

PETER KENNEDY is a playwright and teacher. His plays have received staged readings or productions as part of national festivals produced by The Secret Theatre and T. Schreiber Theatre in New York City (Off Off Broadway); City Theatre of Miami; RL Productions in Fort Lauderdale; Little Fish Theatre of Los Angeles; The Boston Theatre Marathon; The University of Houston;  Theatre Inspirato in Toronto; Oil Lamp Theater in Glenview, IL; and Salem Theatre Company of MA. Peter was chosen as a 2020 semifinalist for both the Eugene O'Neill National Playwriting Conference and Barrington Stage’s Burman New Play Award. In addition, Peter was a 2020 Finalist for Bloomington Playwrights Project's Reva Shiner Comedy Award. Also in 2020, Peter’s dark comedy, Family Game Night, was showcased as part of a Broadway all-star fundraiser for the Actors Fund that featured Tony nominees Carmen Cusack, Richard Kind, and Liz Larsen in his cast. In 2021, Family Game Night went on to be produced as a staged reading with the Provincetown Theater featuring Golden-Globe winner Kathleen Turner heading the ensemble cast. Peter is a member of the Dramatist Guild and the Northampton Playwrights Lab. www.peterkennedyplaywright.com

TALYA KINGSTON is a playwright, dramaturg and theater educator. Her plays include: Circling Suspicion (commissioned and produced by Plays In Place/Historic Northampton); Port of Entry (Silverthorne Theatre, WAM Theatre); Campus Unrest (finalist in the 2019 Bechtel Test Fest); Wave Goodbye (PLAYground TYA Festival at Northwestern University and semi-finalist for Provincetown Playhouse’s New Plays for Young Audiences); Sheryl Addresses the PGO (The New England Monologues Project); Wishing on Satellites; and Anxiety Overdrive. As a dramaturg Talya has worked with WAM Theatre, Hartford Stage, Central Square Theater, Capital Rep, Berkshire Theater Group, New York Fringe Festival, and the Ko Festival. She is a producer and commissioned writer for Plays in Place and an Artistic Advisor for the Play Incubation Collective. Talya has previously held the positions of Associate Artistic Director at WAM Theatre, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater at Hampshire College, Education Director at Hartford Stage, and Educational Programs Coordinator at the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She has an MFA in dramaturgy from UMass/Amherst and has published writing on theater in the Journal of American Drama and Theater, Scene Magazine, Theater Journal, The Moving Voice, European Stages, Howlround and The Valley Advocate. Talya is a proud member of the Northampton Playwrights Lab, Dramatist Guild, and LMDA. newplayexchange.org/talya-kingston

TANYSS RHEA MARTULA has always had a passion for the creation and support of new work. She has worked as an actor, cabaret monologist, teacher, producer, playwright, arts advocate, and, in her younger days, as a toilet scrubber when she was learning about theater from the ground up. Tanyss is a past recipient of an Individual Artists Finalist Grant in Playwriting from The Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is founder of The Northampton 24-Hour Theater Project, produced annually since 2002 until the pandemic. She also wrote periodically for the project and for Play in a Day at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She co-produced the short-lived but popular Back to Back directing productions at A.P.E. Gallery, Northampton, and is pleased to have produced plays by other area playwrights as well as her own work (Two Women from Waldo, Arkansas; The Three Boys; Whoops; Formal in the Tropical Room). Her earlier scripts have received staged readings/productions at: Chicago Dramatists, including the staging of two short plays via contests at C.D; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, where she was awarded an associate member residency; the Spoleto Fringe Festival; Ensemble Studio Theater’s summer retreat; Calliope Theater in Williamstown; the WOW in NYC; and the Voice and Vision Retreat for Women Theatre Artists, NYC-based, with residency at Smith College. Tanyss is proud to call the Pioneer Valley her theater home. She is a member of The Dramatists Guild and an appreciative member of the Northampton Playwrights Lab. She earned her MFA from Goddard College.