Filed under: BCWJ Page & Stage, NYC Theatre, Playwrighting Awards, Script Development, Theatre | Tags: Advocacy for Women, Anne Hamilton, Dramaturg, Dramaturgy, Gender parity, Genne Murphy, Hamilton Dramaturgy, New Roles for Women, NYC, Playwright, Script Development, The Lilly Awards, Women Theatre Artists, Works by Women, Yale School of Drama
Here is my latest Bucks County Womens Journal article. Download it Anne Hamilton’s BCWJ Profile of Genne Murphy.
Profile of Genne Murphy
By Anne M. Hamilton, MFA
Genne Murphy is a rising star in the theatre world. Her plays have been developed or produced in Nebraska, Colorado, New York and Connecticut as well as locally. The Azuka Theatre produced HOPE STREET AND OTHER LONELY PLACES.
Recently, she was honored with the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writer’s Award for her play GIANTESS at the Lilly Awards, hosted at the Signature Theater in New York City. The Lilly Awards celebrate significant contributions by women to the American theatre, including 2016 honorees Danai Gurira, Jesse Mueller and Martha Plimpton.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Murphy has been deeply involved as a writer and arts educator since graduating from Central High. Her many local awards and affiliations include the Philadelphia Young Playwrights, PlayPenn, and the Leeway Foundation Transformation Award/Art and Change Grant.
Originally, she says, the idea for GIANTESS came in a dream: “I was trying to pour water into a tiny glass and it was really annoying. Then all of a sudden I realized, ‘OMG I’m a giant!’ I panicked, woke up. [The dream] really stuck with me–that idea of being so discombobulated and feeling extremely uncomfortable in your body. I thought there were a lot of interesting metaphors to explore.”
Described by the Leah Ryan FEWW program as having, “truly singular and theatrical voice,” Murphy will workshop her play with a few closed-door readings at Primary Stages in New York City and New York Stage and Film before the Fund presents a full public reading in the fall.
“GIANTESS starts with a young woman who is taking care of her ailing, disabled grandmother,” says Murphy. “Early on in the play she discovers a girl her own age in the abandoned factory behind her grandmother’s house – a 30-foot tall giantess. They develop a deepening connection to one another in this very fraught and heightened situation.”
Reflecting on her time with Philadelphia Young Playwrights, she states, “My experience, [as] a student, educator, and staff member enabled the idea of revision – the actual work of revision – to be a less scary prospect.”
She holds a bachelor’s degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.
Anne Hamilton has 25 years of experience as a dramaturg. She is available for script consultations and career advising through hamiltonlit@hotmail.com.
Filed under: BCWJ Page & Stage, Career Advising, Dramaturgy, Memoir, Script Development | Tags: @AnneHamiltonlit, Anne Hamilton, Annie Liebovitz, BCWJ, BCWJ Page & Stage, Dramaturg, Dramaturgy, Freelance Dramaturgy, Hamilton Dramaturgy, Playwright, www.hamiltonlit.com
Please note: I am continuing my practice as a freelance dramaturg with Hamilton Dramaturgy. The office is still open! I am still actively pursuing the activities that I have conducted for 24 years – freelance dramaturgy, script development, research, career advising. I am accepting new clients. hamiltonlit@hotmail.com
Here is my last Bucks County Women’s Journal column – Page & Stage (October/November 2015, column shared with Linda C. Wisniewski)
Creativity Through Planned Reflection
By Anne M. Hamilton, MFA
Last summer I made a conscious effort to set aside time to clear my mind. I took a short hiatus from my dramaturgy practice after teaching the playwriting workshop at the Philadelphia Writers Conference in June. Planning the break took a great deal of effort, because it involved notifying all of my writers and editors that I would not be available for a short while.
As an adult, I find that I have to work twice as hard to find space to rest. Yet if I don’t rest, I can’t regenerate. During my deliberate break, I looked to other women for inspiration. I read photographer Annie Leibovitz’s PILGRIMAGE, a thick coffee table book with photos that she took not on assignment, but from her own sense of interest. She began by visiting writers and artists’ studios, and then began to photograph landscapes and objects. Some of the creative settings belonged to Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Louisa May Alcott and Georgie O’Keeffe.
I returned to some of the things I love to do most. I took a trip to the sea, I visited old homes and churches, and bought fresh produce from local farmers. I walked in strange cities. I took road trips. I walked by rivers and looked at the scenery. I spent more time with people I love and avoided the ones who cause me stress.
What does all of this have to do with what’s happening on stage in Bucks County? Well, what eventually appears on the stage comes from the heart, mind and hands. I did an experiment to change the foundations of my thinking and perceptions.
As a playwright, I don’t know yet what kind of new stage work this break will inspire; I didn’t write anything new during my hiatus. Yet I noted the journeys taken by every one of the women in Leibovitz’s book – whether of isolation, wandering, or exploration.
As Amy Goodman recently said, “Go into the silence.”
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Anne Hamilton has 24 years of experience as a dramaturg. She is available for script consultations and career advising through hamiltonlit@hotmail.com. Her drama THE SHOEBOX is a winner of Little Black Dress INK’s 4th Annual Female Playwrights Onstage Project – OUTSIDE THE LINES – National Festival of New Work. It was read in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and received a production in Arizona in August.
Dowload the article here: BCWJ Article -Creativity Through Planned Refection by Anne Hamilton
Filed under: Career Advising, Dramaturgy, MFA, NYC Theatre, Recent Successes, Script Development | Tags: @AnneHamiltonlit, American Theatre, Anne Hamilton, Dramaturg, Dramaturgy, Educator, Gender parity, Hamilton Dramaturgy, Magda Romanska, THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DRAMATURGY, www.hamiltonlit.com
American Theater magazine has given a terrific review to THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DRAMATURGY, edited by Magda Romanska.
My article, “Freelance Dramaturgs in the Twenty-First Century – Journalists, Advocates, and Curators” garnered praise from the reviewer Philippa Kelly: “One of the book’s highlights is Anne Hamilton’s essay on who dramaturgs are and what they do: cross boundaries, multitask, act as officers of public liaison and conduits for outreach…Hamilton aims to inspire dramaturgs to build confidence in their own creative contributions, and to reach deeper, to act more broadly and boldly.”
I am sending many thanks to Magda for including my chapter in this volume. It has sold out in hardcover, and is now available in paperback for $39.99. (ISBN-13: 978-0415658492, ISBN-10: 0415658497)
http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/07/07/dramaturgs-of-the-world-unite-and-parse-this-text/
Filed under: BCWJ Page & Stage, Dramaturgy, Gender Parity, New Work by Anne, Playwrighting Awards, Recent Successes, Script Development | Tags: @AnneHamiltonlit, Anne Hamilton, BCWJ, BCWJ Page & Stage, Dramaturg, Gender parity, Hamilton Dramaturgy, Little Black Dress INK, New Roles for Women, New Works, Playwright, Playwrighting Awards, www.hamiltonlit.com
Little Black Dress INK
By Anne M. Hamilton, MFA
For the past year I have had the pleasure of being involved in Little Black Dress INK’s Female Playwrights Onstage Project.
Now in its fourth year, the competition is the brainchild of Playwright and Educator Tiffany Antone, who currently resides in Texas. This national festival of new work has a different theme each year and utilizes a peer review process to identify semi-finalists, whose short plays or monologues are then read in different cities across the country. Finalists are chosen from those events. They enjoyed a staged reading at the Los Angeles Theatre Center last year, followed by a production in Arizona in January.
In 2014, the theme was Planting the Seed, and my play OFEM, inspired by my experience as a CSA member at Blooming Glen Farm, was a finalist. It was read in Ithaca, NY, and Los Angeles before being given its premiere in Arizona. Indie Theatre Now will publish OFEM and all the finalists in an online volume of 11 plays.
This year’s theme is Outside the Lines, and my two character drama THE SHOEBOX is a semifinalist. This short play reunites two high school classmates to reminisce in a late night phone call after their homeroom teacher, a nun, has passed away. Theater Unbound in Minneapolis gave it a staged reading along with five other pieces in March. The festival is still unfolding in events across the country.
Tiffany summarizes her goals on her website: “Little Black Dress INK is an experiment in support, inspired by recent revelations in numbers on the subject of just how few female playwrights actually get produced. Through outreach, education, and producing opportunities, Little Black Dress INK strives to create more production opportunities for female playwrights while also strengthening the female playwright network.”
I have found this competition to be a highly effective and rewarding way of reaching those goals. It grows every year, and currently involves 35 new plays and over 60 artists in eight cities. 2016 submission guidelines will be posted on www.littleblackdressink.org on October 1, 2015.
Anne Hamilton has 24 years of experience as a dramaturg. She is available for script consultations and career advising through hamiltonlit@hotmail.com. Her play WHO’S ANDY WARHOL? was performed at The Lost Theatre in London in October, 2014. She will teach a playwriting workshop at the Philadelphia Writers Conference in June 12-14, 2015.
To be published in Anne’s Page & Stage column in the Bucks County Women’s Journal (April/May 2015 issue). www.buckscountywomensjournal.com
Filed under: BCWJ Page & Stage, Career Advising, Dramaturgy, Gender Parity, New Work by Anne, Script Development | Tags: @AnneHamiltonlit, Anne Hamilton, BCWJ, BCWJ Page & Stage, Career Advising, Dramaturg, Dramaturgy, Gender parity, www.hamiltonlit.com
Here is the link to my latest Bucks County Women’s Journal Article.
Writing in the Winter
By Anne M. Hamilton, MFA
I find it very easy to be creative when it’s very cold or very hot outside. I consider myself lucky to live in a four season climate, where I can experience the changing temperatures as well as the differences in light, which stimulate my senses.
This winter, my muse has been working overtime and I’ve completed a new full-length play as well as a 10-minute play and some poetry.
Something about extreme weather inspires me to delve deeply into my imagination and my emotions, and pull out whatever has gotten stuck there, or happens to be emerging into consciousness. I try to go with the flow, and harness my body’s natural rhythms, rather than fighting them by struggling to write, for instance, a comedy or a drama.
As a practice, I stop what I’m doing and sit down to write whenever I am struck by the muse, which I experience as a phrase, or a scene in my head that I can simply write down. For me, it is like going into a meditative state and transcribing the scene that is occurring to me.
For those who are new to playwriting, or are fine-tuning their writing process, it is possible to gradually train the mind to reveal its stories. This can be done by sitting silently for as little as fifteen minutes at a time, and writing down what appears in the mind’s eye. Then the time can be lengthened. It is useful to look over the writing on a regular basis and try to find a pattern that can be made into a monologue or a short play.
I think that it is very important for a playwright to give herself time to go into “the deep mind” as I call it – a meditative form of reflection which allows hidden gems to emerge.
By nurturing my creative spirit and enabling my imagination to leap in its own direction, I am building a pathway for fluent expression.
(c) 2015
Anne Hamilton has 24 years of experience as a dramaturg. She is available for script consultations and career advising through hamiltonlit@hotmail.com. Her play WHO’S ANDY WARHOL? was performed at The Lost Theatre in London in October, 2014. She will teach a playwriting workshop at the Philadelphia Writers Conference in June 12-14, 2015.
Filed under: Dramaturgy, Gender Parity, NYC Theatre, Recent Successes, Script Development, Women Theatre Artists, Works by Women | Tags: @AnneHamiltonlit, Anne Hamilton, Bernadette Cochrane, Columbia University, Columbia University School of the Arts, DJ Hopkins, Editor, Freelance Dramaturgy, Hamilton Dramaturgy, Katalin Trencsényi, Magda Romanska, NYC, Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Women Theatre Artists, Works by Women, www.hamiltonlit.com
On January 21st, I will speak on a panel for a book launch to be held at my alma mater, Columbia University School of the Arts. Please join us!
