PENITENCE

Kia Corthron (Playwright) is the recipient of the 2020 Dramatists Guild Flora Roberts Award. Other honors for her body of work include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, USArtists Jane Addams Fellowship, McKnight National Residency, Simon Great Plains Playwright Award, and she was the 2017 Eclipse Theatre Company Playwright in Residence. Her plays, which include Breath, Boom, A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, and Megastasis, have premiered in New York by Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre; in London by the Royal Court Theatre and Donmar Warehouse; and across the U.S. by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Mark Taper Forum, Goodman Theatre, Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Yale Rep, Baltimore’s CenterStage, Hartford Stage, and others. In 2018 she co-produced Imagine: Yemen, an evening of short plays addressing the humanitarian catastrophe, and her contributed short musical was animated and presented in London at the United Nations/UK We the People’s Film Festival 2019. Her debut novel The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. TV: The Jury, The Wire. New Dramatists alumnus, Dramatists Guild Council member.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden (Director) is a Director, Dramaturg, and Assistant Professor of theater arts at Brandeis University. He has staged new and canonical works in both the U.S. and abroad. Some favorite directing projects include: In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell Alvin McCraney; Insurrection: Holding History by Robert O’Hara; Bulrusher by Eisa Davis; Argonautika by Mary Zimmerman; Big Love by Charles L. Mee; Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl; and Beyond My Circle, the multidisciplinary performance project that he co-devised and staged at the National Theater in Kampala, Uganda. Recent dramaturgy projects include: Native Son by Nambi E. Kelley and the world premiere of Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son by Psalmeyene 24 at Mosaic Theater Company. Wooden is also a scholar and has published widely on contemporary African American art and drama—from the plays of Lydia Diamond, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O’Hara to the performance work of Derrick Adams, Jefferson Pinder, and Adrian Piper. He is currently at work on a monograph that explores the interplay of race and time in contemporary black expressive culture and co-edited the anthology Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP, 2020). An alum of Georgetown University, Wooden earned his PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University.

Keith Randolph Smith (Professor) Broadway: Jitney; American Psycho; Fences; Come Back Little Sheba; King Hedley II; Salome; and The Piano Lesson. Off-Broadway: Lockdown (Rattlestick Theater); Fabulation (Playwright’s Horizon); Paradise Blue (Signature); Intimacy (The New Group); and Holiday Heart (MTC). Regional: How To Catch Creation (Goodman); Water By The Spoonful (The Old Globe); God of Carnage (Alliance); Antony and Cleopatra (Hartford Stage); and The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey (City Theatre). Film: Anesthesia; Malcolm X; Girl Six; Backstreet Justice; Path to Paradise; Journeymen; Fallout; and Dead Dogs Lie. Television: The Good Fight; Law and Order; I’ll Fly Away; NY Undercover; One Life to Live; Cosby; and Onion Sports Dome

Jack Schmitt (Another) Shakespeare Theatre Company: The Amen Corner (u/s); Folger Theatre: Love’s Labor’s Lost, 1 Henry IV (u/s), Nell Gwynn (u/s); Imagination Stage: Inside Out; Prince George’s County Shakespeare: Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing. Regional: American Players Theatre: As You Like It, The Recruiting Officer, Measure for Measure; Actors Theatre of Louisville: Dracula, A Christmas Carol, You Across From Me. Training: Georgetown University, BA in Theater and Performance Studies, Government.