Contact:
Susan Blood,
WHAT Director of Marketing
susanb@what.org
508-349-3011 x 101
Wellfleet, Ma - During the 2011 summer season Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater will launch an ambitious new mentoring program called “WHAT’s Next Generation.”
Now in its 27th season, WHAT will invite local High School and College students to work alongside graduate students enrolled in some of the best conservatory theater programs in the country, as well as playwrights, actors and directors from WHAT’s resident team of theater professionals. Emerging theater artists will work with mentors as they mount a season of new plays at the company’s venues: the Harbor Stage and The Julie Harris Stage.
BFA and MFA candidates from professional training programs, including Brandeis, Brown University/Trinity Rep, the ART Institute, Boston University and the Yale School of Drama (YSD) will mentor students from Cape Cod Community College and Nauset High School in acting, playwriting and other theater disciplines. Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Paula Vogel, Eugene O'Neill Chair of Playwriting at Yale School of Drama, will be an advisor to the new program, working with WHAT Artistic Director, Jeff Zinn, Dramaturg, Dan Lombardo and program coordinator Norman Meranus as they shape the program in its pilot year.
The season of plays at the Harbor includes The Betrothed by Dipika Guha and Neighborhood3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley. Both will be directed by Jesse Jou. All three are graduates of the Yale School of Drama. Guha and Jou will be in residence during July and August leading workshops in playwriting (Guha) and direction/text analysis (Jou.) Other workshops will be offered by WHAT staff: Artistic Director, Jeff Zinn, will lead a workshop in acting. Company dramaturg, Dan Lombardo, will lead a workshop in dramaturgy.
Twelve students from local high schools and colleges will be accepted into the new program by interview/audition. Participating students will be paired with members of the WHAT company – actors, playwrights, directors, designers – based on the interests and career paths of the students. Students will also attend one or more weekly workshops offered by members of the company. Students may also serve as assistant stage managers, assistant directors or in other “backstage” positions as their time allows. (Taking on backstage duties is not a requirement of the program but rather an optional activity. )
In some cases students may be cast as actors in WHAT productions. Such casting is at the discretion of each production’s director. WHAT is a professional company operating under contract with Actors Equity Association. That contract allows for a ratio of Equity and non-Equity performers.
WHAT Mission Statement:
The Mission of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is to present professional quality theater to its audiences; to provide an alternative theater experience not found elsewhere in the region; to advance and preserve the art of the theater for the education and appreciation of the public. WHAT seeks to be a good neighbor, to be of benefit to the economy of Wellfleet, its restaurants, galleries and shops, its working people and its retirees, its residents, non-resident homeowners and its visitors. WHAT seeks to be an active and contributing part of the entire Cape Cod Community. To accomplish its mission, WHAT endeavors to find interesting and provocative works of high quality and to recruit artists with the skill, imagination, and vision to realize those works in production. It also provides a paid summer intern program that provides hands-on experience in a professional environment. [This new mentorship program will function separately from the WHAT internship program. ]
Key personnel:
Dipika Guha – (Playwright) is an MFA playwright at the Yale School of Drama studying with Paula Vogel. Her plays have received workshop productions at Brown University, the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Cabaret. She is the recipient of several fellowships including the Frank Knox Memorial Scholarship at Harvard University, the Adele Kellenberg Fellowship at Brown University and the Eugene O'Neill Fellowship at Yale University. She was part of the Young Writer's Workshop at the Royal Court Theatre in
London. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
Jesse Jou (Director) graduated from Yale School of Drama, where his credits include La Ronde, 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan, and the things are against us [les choses sont contre nous]. Other credits include Take on Me: Adoption, Addiction, and a-ha (New York International Fringe Festival); My Mom Across America (The Kitchen Theatre Co., Ithaca, NY); Estrella Cruz [The Junkyard Queen], Mask Ritual: Electra, Flowers and Other Stories, Language of Angels, and Dipika Guha's Passing (Yale Cabaret). At Yale, he was the recipient of the Edgar and Louise Cullman Scholarship. He served as Artistic Director of the 2010 season of the Yale Summer Cabaret and as the Staff Repertory Director for the 2010-2011 tour of the Acting Company.
Dan Lombardo has been the Dramaturg and Literary Manager at WHAT since 2005. He has also led the WHAT Lab since its creation in 2009. Recently, he directed Blithe Spirit and Michael Harrington's Opus at American Stage Theatre in Tampa Florida. Dan began working in theater at the age of 13 as the percussionist/composer for The Open Stage Company in Hartford, and continued with companies like the Eighth Avenue Review. His work as a dramaturg/research consultant in television and film includes The Irish (a PBS series), The Belle of Amherst (with Claire Bloom for ITV, England), Malice (with Alec Baldwin and Nicole Kidman), Voices and Visions (a 13;part PBS series), The Afterglow (with Burgess Meredith), and several Florentine Films documentaries. Lombardo has appeared in films on PBS and on BBC TV, including Loaded Gun ( with Julie Harris), and a BBC film about literary forgery. Dan is the author of ten books, including the new Cape Cod National Seashore: The First 50 Years. Dan and his wife, Karen Banta, split their time between Western Massachusetts and Cape Cod.
PAULA VOGEL is the Eugene O'Neill Professor (adjunct) of Playwriting and Chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama. Her play, How I Learned to Drive, received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as winning her second OBIE. It has been produced all over the world. Other plays includeThe Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot'N'Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, and The Oldest Profession. In 2004-5 she was the playwright in residence at The Signature Theatre in New York which produced three of her works. Her new play A Civil War Christmas was produced at The Long Wharf Theatre in November 2008, directed by Tina Landau. This past season it was produced at Theatre Works in Palo Alto, CA and by the Huntington Theatre in Boston. She is currently playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as an artistic associate at Long Wharf Theatre. Work in progress includes a commission for Yale Repertory (based on The God of Vengeance), a work in collaboration with director Rebecca Taichman, and a new play, Jitterbugging and the War Effort. Theatre Communications Group has published three books of her work, The Mammary Plays, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays and The Long Christmas Ride Home. A Civil War Christmas will be published in Fall 2011. Most recent awards include the 2010 William Inge Festival Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre Award (past recipients include Arthur Miller, Horton Foote, Edward Albee, and August Wilson). She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in April. Last year, she was awarded the Stephen and Christine Schwarzman Legacy Award for Excellence in Theatre for lifetime achievement and excellence in teaching. She is most honored to have two awards to emerging playwrights named after her: the Paula Vogel Award, created by the American College Theatre Festival in 2003, and the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting is given annually by the Vineyard Theatre, since 2007: its first recipient was Yale School of Drama alum Terrell McCraney. Ms. Vogel won the 2004 Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the OBIE for Best Play in 1992, the Rhode Island Pell Award in the Arts, the Hull-Warriner Award, The Laura Pels Award, the Pew Charitable Trust Senior Award, a Guggenheim, an AT&T New Plays Award, the Fund for New American Plays, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Fellowship, several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the McKnight Fellowship, the Bunting Fellowship, and the Governor's Award for the Arts. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was recently awarded a Thirtini, a most coveted award, from 13P in New York. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, as well as Yaddo.
WHAT Staff:
Mark Hough (Managing Director) Mark Hough has been working in the theater for over thirty years as an actor, director and producing executive. Mark is also an acclaimed writer of literary fiction. Mark has read his work to SRO audiences at the Boot in Norfolk, VA. Mark is a member of the Muse and studies with Tim Farrington. Mark Hough is President of Hough and Associates (www.markhough.org), a full range management, programming, Board development and fund raising consulting business serving not-for-profit organizations and philanthropic foundations. Mark has over 20 years of experience in not-for-profit management and fund development.
Ted Vitale (Production Manager) Before joining WHAT, Ted was Production Stage Manager for D. Benjamen Brown Productions at the Tropicana Casino in Atlantic City, NJ and Production Manager of the Sid Caesar Theater in Huntington, NY, where he worked with Rene Taylor, Joe Bolongna, Frank Gorshin, Lee Meriweather and Gabe Kaplan among others. He has production managed and or company managed many national tours including Raisin with Peabo Bryson and Jeffrey Osborne and The 20th Anniversary tour of Hair among many others. He is the former General Manager of the Provincetown Repertory Theater where he created a playwrights forum on the future of American Theater with August Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Paula Vogel, Terrence McNally, Wendy Kesselman, A.R. Gurney, John Guare, Christopher Durang And Jon Robin Baitz. He is the former Artistic Director of The Academy of Performing Arts in Orleans, MA. He is also the former instructor of Stagecraft at Cape Cod Community College. As a set designer he has designed shows in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Off Broadway and Broadway where he designed for Michael Moriarty's one man show A Special Providence.
Jeff Zinn (Artistic Director) came to WHAT in 1987 to direct Sam Shepard's A Lie of The Mind. He returned the next year to join Gip Hoppe as Co-Artistic Director, becoming Artistic Director in 2000. As WHAT enters its 27th season Jeff will have produced more than 150 WHAT productions and directed more than 50. Under his leadership WHAT has been awarded two prestigious Eliot Norton Awards including one in 2001 for "Establishing a Beachhead For Serious Theatre on Cape Cod." He produced the Boston transfer of Hoppe's, A New War, which won WHAT's second Norton Award for "Best Visiting Production by a Small Company." Productions he has directed, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (starring Julie Harris), Closer by Patrick Marber, and Proof by David Auburn were in the "top ten" named by the Boston Globe. Some of his favorite productions at WHAT are Goose and TomTom by David Rabe, Killer Joe by Tracy Letts, The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh and Daughter of Venus, by his late father, Howard Zinn.
