Spring 2009
Anne Galjour
Unleash Your Voice
Building a Full-Length Play From the Center
 Bay Area playwright and solo performer Anne Galjour invites you to energize your creative process for the New Year. This class will employ vocal, physical, and writing exercises designed to slow down the mind so that the playwright’s characters emerge to write themselves. We will explore the language of lies, the truth of physical action, and the power of silence.
Writing exercises will also delve into elements of craft: character, action, conflict, complication, crisis and stakes. Each week students will have their scenes read aloud. This class is an excellent opportunity to complete a draft or polish a story idea in an open and creative setting.
Feb. 4 – Apr. 8
Wednesdays, 6:30 – 9:30 PM
Click here for more information and to register.
Anne Galjour is a playwright and actor whose credits include Bird in the Hand, Mauvais Temps, Okra, and Hurricane, among many others. She has won numerous awards for her work, including multiple Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards, the American Theater Critics Association Osburn Award for Emerging Playwrights, and the Will Glickman Playwriting Award. “We fail forward” is her teaching motto.
Read an interview with Anne on PF’s blog.
Dominic Orlando
New Play Boot Camp
 Award-winning playwright Dominic Orlando returns with his New Play Boot Camp, an intensive two-week workshop designed to sweat your playwriting muscles and flex your imagination. By the end of this six-day workout, you’ll finish a forty-page one-act play or die trying. The focus is plot and structure, moving the action forward toward resolution. The method is composition, understanding how to shape the rhythms of action and character in the same way composers shape notes and tempos into symphonies. This unique approach and intensive energy will give both new and experienced playwrights a workout they’ll be feeling for years. Writers working to finish an existing script are also welcome.
Feb. 28 – Mar. 12
Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, 6 – 9 PM
Click here for more information and to register.
Dominic Orlando is a Core Writer in the Workhaus Playwrights Collective of the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. His Danny Casolaro Died For You was featured in last year’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He has been a writer-in-residence at the William Inge Festival, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ucross Foundation and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Michael Gene Sullivan
Juggling Words
Doing three things at once with award-winning Head Writer of the SF Mime Troupe
 Imagine watching a play in which the plot and characters stop for some unmotivated movement or a soul-searching bit of “character development,” and suddenly realizing the play you’re watching is yours. I hate that! Whether working on a new piece or fine-tuning a script close to completion, it is essential for writers to find a way to juggle plot, character, and action gracefully.
The objective of the class is to help playwrights think like directors about action and like actors about character, all while telling the story the writer needs heard. By the end of this class each writer should have a better vision of how to make a more complete play out of a current project, or a planned script.
Apr. 12 – May 17
Sundays, 6:30 – 9:30 PM
Click here for more information and to register.
Michael Gene Sullivan is a Resident Playwright for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he helped create some of the Troupe’s biggest hits including 1600 Transylvania Street, Red State, and Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan. 1984, his stage adaptation of George Orwell‘s novel directed by Academy Award winner Tim Robbins, has toured all over the U.S. and around the world. In 2007, working in cooperation with the Ellington Estate, Michael was commissioned to write a biographic screenplay of the life of Duke Ellington, Love You Madly.
Lee Blessing
Afraid To Write That Play? Good.
 This four-day intensive with Pulitzer Prize nominee Lee Blessing examines the usefulness of identifying our own worst fears and using them to create a play. On the principle that truly ambitious works in any genre result from penetrating the most fiercely-guarded areas of a writer’s psyche, we will seek to gain mastery over what terrifies us and convert it into drama.
Along the way, we’ll discuss the dynamic relationship of the unconscious to the conscious mind during the writing process. With any luck, we’ll encounter what’s scary about that as well. Each writer will be asked to generate a short piece based on these explorations, to be read and responded to in class.
May 21 – 24
Thursday, 6 – 9 PM
Friday, 6 – 9 PM
Saturday, 11 AM – 12 PM
Sunday, 11 AM – 2 PM
Click here for more information and to register.
Lee Blessing has an international reputation as a playwright, with productions of his work in countries as far-flung as Japan, South Africa, France and Brazil, as well as numerous regional and off-Broadway productions. His play A Walk in the Woods was produced on Broadway and in London’s West End. Productions of Blessing’s plays have earned numerous awards including an Obie, a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an L.A. Critics’ Circle Award and the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Award. He has also received nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony and Olivier Awards. Blessing is head of the graduate playwriting department at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
One-on-One Dramaturgy
New! PF’s New Play Institute will soon be offering one-on-one dramaturgical sessions. Get valuable feedback, tailored to your play’s specific needs, to help you reach the next stage in your process. For information, email Sonia Fernández at sonia@playwrightsfoundation.org
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