Elemental Theatre Collective is proud to present its fourth annual original short play festival at Perishable Theatre. This year’s collection is entitled the father, the son and the holy go.go, and features new plays by George Brant, Alexander Platt, and Dave Rabinow.
The writing challenge this year was for each playwright to create a play using elements of the Catholic Sacraments, and to set the plays in a shared location. The playwrights each drew two of the seven Sacraments out of a hat, leaving one as a wild card; from another hat, they drew the location. The result: three plays, set in a remote cabin, using Baptism, Confirmation, Communion, Holy Orders, Matrimony, Reconciliation, and the Annointing of the Sick as their jumping off point.
George Brant, in his first collaboration with ETC, is a playwright whose plays have been produced and developed at theaters across the country. His plays include Elephant’s Graveyard, Ashes, NOK, The Lonesome Hobos, One Hand Clapping, Terminal One, The Royal Historian of Oz, Lovely Letters, Three Men in a Boat, Borglum! The Mount Rushmore Musical, Tights on a Wire, Night of the Mime, and Any Other Name, which was recently produced by Premiere Stages. His script Elephant’s Graveyard was awarded the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center and the Keene Prize for Literature. It will be published this winter by Samuel French. He has received writing fellowships from the James A. Michener Center for Writers, the MacDowell Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center. George received his Masters in Writing from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
Alexander Platt recently directed the company’s acclaimed production of Amadeus at Beneficent Church. Platt, Elemental’s Artistic Director, has written plays for each of its four go.go festivals, including Profit Margin (2007), True Time Broke (2008), and his contribution to this year’s festival, RedPop. Together, Platt and Rabinow have co-written two evenings of short plays – The End of the World Cabaret in 2006, and last year’s go.go festival, in which each wrote five short plays one after the other to create the ten plays in deca.go.go.
Dave Rabinow, a founding member of the Collective, has been writing plays for the company since its inception. His play, A Boy and his Ball, was published as part of the Boston Theatre Marathon Vol. 4 Anthology by Baker’s Plays. Elemental has produced his plays Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (2004), Shelter from the Storm (2005), Regenesis (2007), Six Short Films about Black Holes (2008), and Two of Us for the current festival. He adapted Elemental’s free summer tour of Carlo Gozzi’s commedia masterpiece King Stag (2007) into rhyming verse, co-writing the songs with composer Paul Scharf.
Rabinow is also the driving force behind ETC’s popular late-night musical radio plays. He created the Halloween/Election Night extravaganza Zombie President in the fall of 2008, and co-wrote Recession: The Musical! for the 4th of July, 2009, in collaboration with Peter Sampieri, one of Elemental’s Resident Directors.
For the first time in the festival’s history, the father, the son and the holy go.go will feature Platt, Rabinow, D’Arcy Dersham and Kelly Seigh on stage in the same evening. The four graduated together from Trinity Rep’s MFA program in 2002 and form the nucleus of Elemental Theatre Collective’s acting company. They are pleased to be joined by Melissa Bowler, a member of Improv Jones, who appeared in Elemental’s pent.a.go.go in 2007, the first year of the festival. Platt and Rabinow will each direct a play, with Resident Dramaturg Melissa Rabinow making her directing debut with the festival.
