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Playworks is a production group formed to provide development for new scripts for stage and film through production, workshop, and collaboration, and to offer related education opportunities for artists and audiences.

 

Formed by director Steve Umberger, Playworks has developed new scripts, produced, co-produced with other organizations, and toured, and many of its projects have had long lives. The Playworks revival of Shirley Valentine appeared at seven theatres over the course of seven years. The new Clyde Edgerton/Mike Craver musical Lunch at the Piccadilly has been developed in four productions and readings/workshops over seven years. And Dream (a retelling of Shakespeare's classic A Midsummer Night's Dream) has had an eight year "rehearsal period" in four productions at three theatres.

Funding for Playworks projects comes from private investors, from organizations involved with collaborations, and from grants and foundations, previously including Rockwell International and The Wesley Mancini Foundation. The production team is made up of designers, directors, writers, technicians, and performers who have worked professionally - and often together - for many companies, in film, on television, and at theatres around the country. Playworks is interested in developing projects in an environment and on a schedule that is most conducive to exploring their fullest potential, in commercial and non-profit arenas.


 
New script reading with playwright Judy Simpson Cook (left)
Among past productions are the premieres of Counter Girls by Michael Russell and Some Things That Can Go Wrong at 35,000 Feet by John Orlock. Playworks has also collaborated with Spirit Square Arts Center, Davidson College, The Light Factory, Festival Stage, Florida's Riverside Theatre and others.

For staged readings and new script festivals, partnerships have included The Light Factory for Thinking in Pictures.  TIP featured the unusual format of film scripts in staged readings. (Gospel Hill, an entry in the festival, was soon afterward made into a feature film starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett.) Film projects include shorts based on the plays Boca by Christopher Kyle and Husbandry by Patrick Tovatt.  Boca was the recipient of an Arts & Science Council Emerging Artist Grant.

Current projects include the continued development of the musical Lunch at the Piccadilly, based on the best-selling novel by Clyde Edgerton, with songs by former Red Clay Rambler and Drama Desk Award winner Mike Craver. It has had three productions, and a concert performance at the York Theatre Company in New York, an incubator for many well-known musicals including Avenue Q.



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About the work
 
 
I once did an interview with a writer who conducted poetry workshops as part of his professional residencies. He worked with people who created beautiful poetry - some of the best he'd known - and who he would later be surprised to learn were developmentally disabled. The arts speak a language that outsmarts our "smarter selves," through which we can interpret what we're feeling, not just thinking. And maybe more immediately than any of the arts, the action of plays and films take us in real time to a place, and a perspective, we've never seen or had before.

Playworks was formed to develop and showcase projects through readings, workshops and productions. The stories are as diverse as the world we live in, from the soulful silliness of Lunch at the Piccadilly to the edgy unpredictability of Boca. But each is told with a writer's authentic voice, and each is a ticket to someplace new, in head and heart. - Steve Umberger, Director


With Mike Craver (c) and Clyde Edgerton (r) at Lunch at the Piccadilly

Steve Umberger has worked on many plays and film/video projects as director, producer, writer, or actor. He has been involved in the formation or development of three arts centers and four companies.



 
___________Playworks___________
A production group for the development of new work for stage and film


 

Photo credits on the site: Donna Bise, Nyghtfalcon, Norris Greenlee, Tom Terrell, Meredith Stephens