STUSA Playwriting Workshop in Asheville

The Senior Theatre League of America will meet in Asheville, North Carolina, June 6-9, 1910, and there'll be a playwriting workshop during the conference. Here's the working draft of the description:

Outline

Playwrights gather each morning for a double session (roughly 9 to noon), working on exercises and assigned topics. Each writer will produced a ten minute play by the end of the conference, which will be given a reading by participants during the festival’s final session. Workshop will be coordinated by Dr. Alan Woods of Ohio State’s Department of Theatre, and an experienced playwright to be named. Woods, working with Theatre and Aging Pioneer Dr. Joy Reilly, teaches courses in the only graduate Senior Theatre program in North America at Ohio State. He has run the bi-annual Eileen Heckart Drama for Seniors Competition since 2003 and hosted an annual retreat for members of the International Centre for Women Playwrights since 2007. In addition, Woods sponsored the Limbo Project in 2008. More information is at http://seniortheatre.blogspot.com; on the other projects, see http://icwpohioretreat.blogspot.com, http://heckartdrama.blogspot.com and http://limboplays.blogspot.com.

for more information about the STLA, see http://www.seniortheatre.com/html/senior_theatre_usa.html

On to St. Louis! Twice!

We'll be doing the conference circuit twice this year in St. Louis, then Toronto-- Joy Reilly and I will be conducting workshops on theatre and aging at the Mid America Theatre Conference in St. Louis in early March -- the ones that a winter snow storm stopped us from doing in Minneapolis last winter -- and then be back in St. Louis for the Senior Theatre League of America conference; I've been asked to coordinate a playwrights' workshop with two distinguished American playwrights, and to propose some academic panels on theatre and aging. So working on that. Currently arranging readings for the 2007 Eileen Heckart Drama for Seniors winners and runners-up. The first, a reading of For Unto Us by Massachusetts playwright James McClindon, was so successful that Dignity, the Roman Catholic GLBT group, asked us to do it again--and we did, with about 45 enthusiastic folks in attendance.