THE MISSION

To produce and develop new

American theater.

THE VISION

The ultimate theater

experience.

CORE VALUES

Fearless art; Daring and

diverse stories; A profound

dynamic between the audience,

the artist, and the work.

INTENTIONALLY CREATED TO thinkTHEATER

We are the Contemporary American Theater Festival. We exist to think

theater. We have a fierce hunger for stories: emotionally complex stories,

stylistically sophisticated stories, profoundly contemporary stories. We

have adventurous tastes for compelling new plays and we dare to present

them in rotating repertory. We have an insatiable appetite for conversation.

We thinktheater. We talktheater. We make theater. Simply put, we pioneer

and curate ambitious new theater.

It is time to escape, time to engage with the best new plays in America.

We invite you to immerse yourself in an enhanced repertory experience.

Experience the power of story. Experience the conversation. Experience

our artistic community and celebrate our 25th Anniversary Season.

It is time to thinktheater again this summer. It is time to talktheater

with our community of artists, theater makers, and patrons. It is time

to reignite your imagination and experience something new, something

bold, something unique. It’s time to consider different points of view

with five compelling, provocative, and entertaining new plays —about us,

by us, for us. Join the conversation when we deliver new work by Johnna

Adams, Sheila Callaghan, Steven Dietz, Barbara Hammond and Michael

Weller on stage in July. You will want to participate in this enhanced

theatrical experience.

You play a vital and necessary role in our mission to produce and develop

the best new American theater. You have the chance to be more than just

a spectator. Become an active participant in our process. Our Theater

Festival is a place where you can have a living conversation about the work

and celebrate our cultural distinctions and identity. I want to personally

invite you to join us in an on-going dialogue about the future. We will

fascinate, amuse, comfort, provoke and entertain you. We will make you

laugh, dream, shiver, weep, and most importantly, make you think…theater.

JOIN US!

ED HERENDEEN , Producing Director

PS: Included with this year’s line-up of plays, we have

provided a NEW workbook to help you fully plan the

ultimate theater experience!

25 t h S E A S O N

J U L 1 0 –AU G 2 , 2 0 1 5

J O H N N A A DA M S

S H E I L A C A L L A G H A N

ST E V E N D I E TZ

B A R B A R A H A M M O N D

M I C H A E L W E L L E R

A Love Story by Johnna Adams

WORLDBUILDERS

WORLD PREMIERE

SPONSORED BY KATHA KISSMAN

WORLDBUILDERS

Max and Whitney live in their own, imaginary worlds. They are both patients in a clinical trial experimenting with a new drug—a treatment that will cure them of their schizophrenic dreams and flights of fancy—that will make them functioning members of society. As the pills take effect, their fantasies fade. And amidst their struggles to preserve their illusions they fall in love. Max and Whitney must choose between a love that is real and the worlds that they have built.

Johnna Adams received a Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association Citation in 2013 for her play Gidion’s Knot. She is the 2011 recipient of the Princess Grace Award and a 2012 Finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Gidion’s Knot was published in the December 2012 edition of American Theatre Magazine. The Contemporary American Theater Festival premiered Gidion’s Knot in 2012 and twelve regional productions were planned around the country in the following 2013-14 season.

Flux Theatre Ensemble (New York) produced her play Sans Merci in 2013 which was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award for best play. Gidion’s Knot and Sans Merci are published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. Johnna received a 2012 MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College with Tina Howe.

World Builders has been submitted as a rolling world premiere by the Contemporary American Theater Festival as part of the National New Play Network’s Continued Life Program.

Studio 112, Center for Contemporary Arts/I, 92 West Campus Drive

Run time: 90 minutes

A Dark Comedy by Sheila Callaghan

Everything You Touch

Victor is a ruthless 1970s fashion designer and a devotee of the “beauty-is-pain” aesthetic. Esme, his glamorous lover and muse, is pushed aside when an ordinary Midwestern woman, Louella, inspires Victor to make his artistry accessible to the masses. A generation later, Jess, a self-loathing woman, wrestles her own family demons to find her way through the world of fashion that will not give her a second look. Flashing back and forth in time, Everything You Touch is a fierce, lushly written dark comedy that exposes the struggle to find an identity that is more than skin deep.

Sheila Callaghan’s plays include That Pretty Pretty (Or, The Rape Play); Roadkill Confidential; Scab; Crawl Fade to White; Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake); and Lascivious Something. Other credits: Soho Rep, Playwright’s Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, Woolly Mammoth, and Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater, among others.

Callaghan was profiled by Marie Claire as one of “18 Successful Women Who Are Changing the World” and also named one of Variety magazine’s “10 Screenwriters to Watch” in 2010. Sheila is the recipient of the Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a Jerome Fellowship, a MacDowell Residency, a Cherry Lane Mentorship Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, and the prestigious Whiting Award. Sheila is also a resident of New Dramatists.

Everything You Touch is an original work commissioned by True Love Productions. The World Premiere was produced in Pasadena, California April 2014 by The Theatre@Boston Court with Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater.

Frank Center Theater, 260 University Drive

Run time: 120 minutes

Contains explicit language and partial nudity. For mature audiences only.

5PLAYS

NEW WORK

Hostel YOUTH!

ideas!

L O D G I N G

DiverseStories

MARINOFFT H E A T E R

In Context SERIES

FEARLESS

ART

talktheater

experiencetheater

ULTIMATE THEATER E X P E R I E N C E

FESTIVAL

R O A D S C H O L A R P R O G R A M

OPENING NIGHT RECEPTIONEDBREAKFAST with

think theater

FREE

PARKING

EXHIBITIONSART

DINING

FRANK CENTER STAGE

COMMUNITYENGAGEMENT

ACCESS

HISTORIC SHEPHERDSTOWN

POST SHOWDISCUSSIONS

Shopping

R E P E R T O R Y

ROTATING

L I F E LO N G LEARNING P R O G R A M

LATE NIGHT SALON

Stage Reading SERIES

WV Humanities Lecture SERIES

L U N C H& A R T

think theater

STUDIO

112

APPRENTICESHOWCASE

A Thriller by Steven Dietz

WORLD PREMIERE

SPONSORED BY MINA GOODRICH AND LAWRENCE DEAN & PAUL AND LISA WELCH

At an abandoned motel on a desolate American road, a distraught mother WAITS. Having hired an experienced but cruel private investigator, she believes she will be reunited with her runaway daughter. What happens instead—in this smart, harrowing, edge-of-your-seat thriller—is something that will shock her to the core. How far can you push the bonds of family? And how far will you go to bring them back?

Steven Dietz’s thirty-plus plays and adaptations have been produced in re- gional theatres and internationally have been seen in England, Japan, Germany, France, Australia, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Slovenia, Argentina, Peru, Greece, Singapore, South Korea and South Africa.

He received the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award for Fiction— produced Off-Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company; the PEN USA West Award in Drama for Lonely Planet; the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play for Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure; and the Yomiuri Shimbun Award (the Japanese “Tony”) for his adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel, Silence. Other widely produced plays include the Pulitzer-nominated Last of the Boys, Inventing Van Gogh, Private Eyes, God’s Country, Halcyon Days, and The Nina Variations which premiered at CATF in 1996. CATF produced his Yankee Tavern in 2008.

On Clover Road is being produced as a rolling world premiere by the Contemporary American Theater Festival as part of the National New Play Network’s Continued Life Program.

Frank Center Theater, 260 University Drive

Run time: 120 minutes

A N E W P LAY C O M M I S S I O N & W O R L D P R E M I E R E

COMMISSIONED AND SPONSORED BY JENNY EWING ALLEN

In February 2012, five young women walked into the Church of Christ the Savior in the center of Moscow and offered up a punk prayer to the Mother of God—

“Virgin Mary, Chase Putin Away!” The young activists, who call themselves Pussy Riot, played and shouted for exactly 48 seconds before being dragged out of the church by security guards and sent home. That night they uploaded a video of their performance to YouTube, and within hours became enemies of both Church and State. The girls were arrested, tried, and sent to labor camps for hooliganism and inciting religious hatred. But unlike dissidents from Soviet times, the Western media machine took hold of the story and turned Pussy Riot into the greatest piece of performance art in Russian history. This is their story.

Barbara Hammond is a New Dramatists resident playwright (Class of 2018) and currently under commission from both the Royal Court Theatre and the Contemporary American Theater Festival.

Awards: 2014 Seven Devils Theatre Conference; the 2012 Helen Merrill Distin-guished Playwright Award; 2010-2014 Yale Playwrights Festival mentor; a 2011 Edward Albee Foundation Fellow; a Tyrone Guthrie Centre repeat resident in Annaghmakerrig; finalist at the Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Festival and the Kerouac Project; Special Jury Award, First Irish 2009 Theatre Festival. She is a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, and was named one of the Influential Women of 2011 by the Irish Voice.

Film: Directors’ Award, San Francisco International Shorts Festival for June Weddings with Tom Noonan and Elzbieta Czyzewska.

Supported, in part, by Grants from the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation.

Marinoff Theater, Center for Contemporary Arts/II, 62 West Campus Drive

Run time: 100 minutes

Contains graphic language. For mature audiences only.

FULLCATASTROPHE

TH

E

WORLD PREMIERE

A Comedy by Michael Weller

Based on the novel by David Carkeet

SPONSORED BY LYNN AND DOLORES SHIRLEY & MINA GOODRICH AND LAWRENCE DEAN

CATASTROPHEDr. Jeremy Cook has a problem. While he is a linguist (of moderate renown), he is also unemployed, broke, and haunted by the words of an old friend who says that basically, ‘his timing sucks majorly.’ In desperation, Cook accepts an offer from the enigmatic Roy Pillow to serve as part of a research experiment, living with a married couple as their relationship counselor. However, Cook’s lack of: a) experience b) understanding of love c) history of successful relationships d)

“common sense” and e) instinct—guides this couple from a dysfunctional marriage toward the hilarious “full catastrophe.”

Michael Weller is best known for his plays Moonchildren, Loose Ends, Spoils of War and his trilogy including What the Night Is For, 50 Words (MCC), and Side Effects (MCC). He wrote the book for the musical Doctor Zhivago, from the novel by Boris Pasternak, which opens on Broadway at the end of March.

His films include Hair, Ragtime and Lost Angels and a teleplay of his Broadway drama Spoils of War, starring Kate Nelligan. He was a writer-producer on the criti-cally acclaimed series Once & Again.

Awards: Academy Award nomination; N.A.A.C.P. Outstanding Contribution Award; Critics Outer Circle Award; a Rockefeller Foundation Grant; a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award, and a Helen Merrill Award for playwriting.

Marinoff Theater, Center for Contemporary Arts/II, 62 West Campus Drive

Run time: 90 minutes

thinktheater

DESIGN: Francheska Guerrerowww.behance.net/FrancheskaGuerrero

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25th SEASON • JUL 10–AUG 2, 2015

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contemporaryamericantheaterfestival AT SHEPHERD UNIVERSITY