Lastlines, a professional theater in Des Moines IA, is in production for the World Premiere of One Bitter Winter by celebrated playwright and Lastlines regular Michaela Bursar, and their sights are set on a move Off-Broadway. Starring a well-known television actor, a young New York stage actress, members of the local Des Moines community theatre circle, and a supporting staff that includes an intern who is sleeping in the prop closet, and a production manager who resorts to legal and illegal side-hustles to pay off his graduate school debt, we get a behind the scenes look at how the professional theater sausage really gets made.
The evening includes a post-reading conversation with the author.
Directed by John Pietrowski
Recommended donation: $10
Presented thanks to a generous grant from the Smart Foundation, the NJWTP is co-produced with the Madison Arts and Culture Alliance, in partnership with MCAC. The project will present concert readings of seven new works by women playwrights from New Jersey.
Johnna Adams is the author of more than 20 full length plays. Four plays are published with Dramatists Play Serivce (Gidion’s Knot, Sans Merci, Lickspittles . . . , and World Builders). Six plays are published with Original Works Publications (Angel Eaters, Rattles, 8 Little Antichrists, Cockfighters, Sacred Geometry of . . ., and Nurture). Johnna received a Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association Citation in April 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 Theatre Festival premiered Gidion’s Knot in Shepherdtown, WV, in summer of 2012 and more than 40 productions have taken place around the country, including productions at InterAct Theatre (Philadelphia), Profiles (Chicago), Kitchen Dog (Dallas), Stages (Houston), Aurora (Berkeley) and Furious Theatre Company (Los Angeles)
CATF has also produced her play World Builders (summer of 2015). Flux Theatre Ensemble (New York) produced her play Sans Merci in spring of 2013 in New York. The script was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award for best play. Her play Skinless was developed at the 2012 MFA Playwrights’ Workshop at the Kennedy Center and read at Rattlestick (New York) in winter of 2012. Her play Lickspittles, Buttonholers, and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens was produced by Impetuous Theatre in autumn of 2013. Johnna graduated from the DePaul University Theatre School with a BFA in Acting and received a 2012 MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College with Tina Howe.