Victory Gardens adds 2 new ensemble members

• VICTORY GARDENS WELCOMES NILO CRUZ, JOEL DRAKE JOHNSON

• TO ITS PLAYWRIGHTS ENSEMBLE

• Chicago’s #1 presenter of new plays also awards commissions to Aaron Carter

• and Laura Jacqmin; Merri Biechler’s Real Girls Can’t Win to be workshopped in December

• CHICAGO, November 5, 2007 – Victory Gardens Theater Artistic Director Dennis Zacek announced today the addition of two new playwrights to the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble, plus two new play commissions and a December workshop designed to fuel the theater’s new play mission.
  

• “I’m thrilled to share fantastic news - Nilo Cruz, the only Latino ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the most produced Cuban-American playwright in the U.S., and Chicago scribe Joel Drake Johnson, whose plays are regularly audience favorites at Victory Gardens and Steppenwolf Theater, have formally accepted my invitation to join the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble,” said Zacek. “Both Joel and Nilo are important new voices in contemporary American theater, and we couldn’t be happier to have them officially join the Victory Gardens family.”

• Said Cruz, “It’s a great honor to have an artistic home in Chicago, especially to be part of the Victory Garden Theater, one of the few theaters in this country dedicated to playwrights.” Cruz received the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for Anna in the Tropics, which Victory Gardens introduced to Chicago that same year with a smash hit Midwest premiere that subsequently transferred to the Goodman for an extended run. Victory Gardens also presented the 2005 Chicago debut of Cruz’s Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams. The Midwest premiere of A Park in Our House, Cruz’s poetic drama about a family caught in Castro’s Cuba in 1970, officially opens tonight and runs through December 9 at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, as a co-production with Teatro Vista, directed by Zacek. For tickets, call 773.871.3000 or go to VictoryGardens.org.
  

• Johnson responded “It is an honor being part of the Victory Gardens Theatre commitment to new plays.” Well known for creating indelible, outrageously funny, painfully human characters, Johnson’s plays walk the line exquisitely between comedy and drama. His most recent productions at Victory Gardens include Before My Eyes and End of the Tour, and A Blameless Life and Tranquility Woods at Steppenwolf. His new play Four Places, a dark family comedy directed by Victory Gardens Associate Artistic Director Sandy Shinner, will premiere next spring at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, March 28-May 4, 2008.

• The addition of Cruz and Johnson expands the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble from 12 to 14 members, and represents the first additions to the ensemble since its founding in 1996 as a diverse group of writers under the roof of one producing organization. At the time, there were, and still are, many theaters devoted to developing new plays. But Victory Gardens stands distinctively apart from them in its ensemble structure, an arrangement that helped Victory Gardens receive the 2001 Tony Award for Regional Theatre.

Founding members are Claudia Allen, Dean Corrin, Lonnie Carter, Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie, John Logan, Nicholas Patricca, Douglas Post, James Sherman, Charles Smith, and Jeffrey Sweet. Each is either a Chicago author, or a writer with deep connections to Chicago and Victory Gardens. All view Victory Gardens as their artistic home, where their work – as varied as the playwrights themselves - receives priority consideration for mainstage production. In fact, since its founding in 1974, Victory Gardens has produced 152 world premiere plays, 67 by ensemble members, affirming the company’s record of presenting more world premiere mainstage productions than any other theater in Chicago.

While the ensemble is at the core of production (a minimum of three ensemble plays are typically presented for each six-play season at Victory Gardens), new works by many other local and national playwrights keep a constant flow of original projects on the Gardens’ stage. To that end, Zacek also announced today two new play commissions, as well as a workshop production, that will further the company’s mission as a breeding ground for new plays.

Two young writers – Aaron Carter and Laura Jacqmin - are each receiving commissions to develop new plays for consideration by Victory Gardens. Additionally, playwright Merri Biechler will see her new play Real Girls Can’t Win! - a comedy with an all-female cast examining technology, body image and popularity at an unnamed college – receive a professional workshop at Victory Gardens this December, culminating in a staged reading that will be free and open to the public. These commissions and workshop are part of Victory Gardens’ New Audiences for New Plays initiative, funded by a Wallace Foundation Excellence Award.

Victory Gardens continues to expand its artistic boundaries under Zacek, who is celebrating his 30th season at the helm of Victory Gardens, the longest tenure of any artistic director in Chicago. Victory Gardens is now in its second season producing new works for the American stage in its new, state-of-the-art, $11.8 million mainstage in Chicago’s historic Biograph Theater, which has expanded the company’s artistic flexibility to meet the desires of its playwrights, and enhanced its ability to welcome and honor patrons old and new. With the opening of the Biograph last fall, Victory Gardens renamed its longtime home at 2257 N. Lincoln the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, which it is keeping for the production of plays, rental productions, rehearsals, administrative offices and the Victory Gardens Training Center.

Victory Gardens Theater is designated an Established Regional Arts Institution by the Illinois Arts Council (IAC), and is partially supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, a CityArts Program 3 Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. For complete information, visit VictoryGardens.org.

• BACKGROUNDER
  

• Victory Gardens Theater: An American Center for New Plays

• Biographies of new Playwrights Ensemble members

• and newly commissioned playwrights

• Nilo Cruz was the first dramatist of Hispanic descent to receive the Pulitzer Prize, in 2003 for Anna in the Tropics. Victory Gardens began its relationship with Cruz that same year by premiering Anna in the Tropics in Chicago, and subsequently transferring its production to the Goodman for an extended run. In his plays, Cruz almost always journeys back to Cuba, even when the play is not set there. They include Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, presented by Victory Gardens in 2005, as well as Night Train to Bolina, Dancing on her Knees, Two Sisters and a Piano, A Bicycle Country, Lorca in a Green Dress, Beauty of the Father, Ybor City, and translations of Lorca’s Doña Rosita, The Spinster and The House of Bernarda Alba. Cruz has been the recipient of numerous other awards and fellowships, including two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, San Francisco's W. Alton Jones award and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award. In addition to Victory Gardens, his work has been seen at Apple Tree Theatre, the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey, New York's Shakespeare Festival's Public Theatre, South Coast Rep, Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, New York Theatre Workshop, Magic Theatre, Minneapolis Children's Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Washington's Studio Theatre, Florida Stage, The Coconut Grove Playhouse, and New Theatre in Coral Gables.

• Joel Drake Johnson’s first Victory Gardens production, Before My Eyes in 1998, was nominated for best new play by the Joseph Jefferson Committee. Victory Gardens also produced The End of the Tour which was chosen for inclusion in the anthology New Plays From Chicago and was published once again by The Broadway Play Publishing Company. The Road Theatre will present the West Coast Premiere of The End of the Tour in their 2007-08 season. Four Places, a finalist in the National Arts Club’s Best New Play Competition, will be his third Victory Gardens world premiere next spring. The Jeff Award winning production of The Fall to Earth was first produced (in an extended run) by Steppenwolf Theatre in 2004. It was published by Broadway Play Publishing in the fall of 2006. Steppenwolf subsequently commissioned Johnson to write A Blameless Life and Tranquility Woods which they produced in the summer of 2005 and 2007, respectively. Johnson got his start as a playwright with Chicago’s critically acclaimed Econo-Art Theatre who produced such plays as Beautiful Dreamer and Blind Hearts. As the Beaver, a critical and popular hit for Chicago’s Zebra Crossing Theatre was also produced at the Burbage Theatre in LA and the Vortex Theatre in Austin, TX. Other plays have been produced at the New Playwrights’ Theatre in Ashland, Oregon; the Haunted Space in LA; the West Bank Theatre and The Ensemble Studio Theatre in NYC, Manbites Dog Theatre in Durham and the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Johnson won an Illinois Arts Council grant for Blind Hearts and, once again, for A Blue Moon. A Blue Moon was produced at the Chicago Dramatists Theatre and, in the fall of 2002, it was nominated for best new play by the Joseph Jefferson Committee. Johnson is a member of The Dramatists Guild, Pen America Center and the Chicago Dramatists advisory board. He has taught playwriting at the Victory Gardens Training Center, Northwestern University, DePaul University, Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire. He lives in Chicago and New Buffalo, Michigan where he is working on a third commission from Steppenwolf Theatre.

Aaron Carter joined Victory Gardens as its new Literary Manager in September 2007. He received his MFA in Playwriting from Ohio University, where he was mentored by Charles Smith, head of the university’s Professional Playwriting Program, and a founding member Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble. His plays include Panther Burn (produced in 2006 by MPAACT at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, nominated for the Black Theater Alliance's "Best Writing of a Play" Award) Kegger (Collaboraction's Sketchbook 2006), First Words (Around the Coyote reading series) Swamp Baby (side project theatre company Harvest Series, Soho Think Tank Sixth Floor Reading Series), If Condition (Manhattan Rep's Winterfest). His play Raw Material was produced by EP Theater in September 2007.

Laura Jacqmin received her BA at Yale University, co-founded the Yale Playwrights Festival, and also received her MFA at Ohio University. Her plays includeThe Revisionists (which received a staged reading at Steppenwolf Theater as part of their 2007 First Look Rep series),Happy Slap (winner of Aurora Theatre Company’s 2007 Global Age Project, produced by the Ohio University School of Theater in their 2006-2007 season), 10 Virgins (which will receive its world premiere in Chicago Dramatists’ 2007-2008 season), and Butt Nekkid, which will be produced by Chicago’s side project theatre company.

Merri Biechler is another MFA graduate of Ohio University. Her play Real Girls Can’t Win opened the Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwright's Festival there last spring, culminating her work in the program. Her other plays include Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver, and she was recently commissioned by the Kennedy Center and the White House Historical Association to write a new play for young audiences exploring Dolly Madison's rescue of the George Washington painting from the White House before British troops burned the building to the ground in 1814.