NEW YORK CITY: Page Seventy-Three Productions (Page 73) has announced its shows for 2016, the P73 Playwriting Fellow, the Tow Playwright in Residence, Interstate 73 Writers Group members, and new leadership positions, American Theatre has learned exclusively.
Michael Walkup will join Page 73’s leadership team as producing artistic director, and Jennifer Lagundino will be managing director. Both positions are new to the company. Walkup has been with the theatre since 2011, previously serving as producing director and associate director, and Lagundino has held positions at Yale Repertory Theatre, Signature Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and Perseverance Theatre. Liz Jones and Asher Richelli, the founding executive directors, will now have the title of founding directors.
“Page 73 has been involved in a strategic planning process, which has included looking closely at our staffing and leadership structure with a particular eye towards the company’s future,” said Jones and Richelli in a joint statement. “We and our board of directors are delighted to create two new leadership positions at Page 73 to guide the company’s continued growth and artistic excellence, and to ensure its long-term sustainability,”
Page 73’s 2016 line-up will start with the world premiere of Leah Nanako Winkler’s Kentucky (April 2016), co-produced with Ensemble Studio Theatre/Radio Drama Network. The play is about a twentysomething woman who leaves her family in Kentucky for a new life in New York City, and tries to save her sister in the South from marrying too young. Morgan Gould will direct.
Next will be the world premiere of Ultimate Beauty Bible (Fall 2016), which will also mark the beginning of the 2016–17 season. Written by Caroline V. McGraw, the play is about two friends in their early thirties who work together as fashion magazine editors, and the choices they face when one of them learns she has ovarian cancer. Stephen Brackett will direct.
McGraw has also been named the 2016 Tow Playwright in Residence, an initiative supported by a grant from the Tow Foundation. McGraw will receive a full-time salary, health insurance, a discretionary budget to support ongoing artistic initiatives, as well as a professional premiere of her play.
Hansol Jung will be the 2016 P73 Playwriting Fellow, which supports a playwright who has yet to have a professional premiere in New York City. Jung was selected from 350 applicants, and will receive a $10,000 award in addition to $10,000 for the development of several new plays over the course of the year. Jung is a graduate of Penn State University and the Yale School of Drama. Prior to moving to the U.S., she had a career translating American musicals into Korean in her native Seoul. Her plans for the fellowship include a play exploring the drug industry and further work on a romantic tragedy between a North Korean defector and her South Korean lover. Page 73 will produce at least one public workshop of Jung’s work.
“Her works embrace many modes of theatrical storytelling and are steeped in the political and personal forces that cause violence in the world, whether in Uganda, North Korea, or in a California home managing an illegal adoption,” said Walkup in a statement.
The Interstate 73 Writers’ Group, which offers writers a year of bi-monthly meetings to share new works in progress, has a new cohort for 2016. Kevin Artigue (The Most Dangerous Highway in the World), Kate Attwell (I Am a Boy’s Choir), Amina Henry (Bully), Alex Lubischer (Bobbie Clearly), Jiehae Park (peerless), Jeremy Tiang (A Dream of Red Pavilions), and McGraw (Ultimate Beauty Bible) will take part in the program this year.
Applications for Page 73’s 2017 development programs are now available online at www.page73.org, and are due April 1, 2016. There is no fee to apply.
Page 73, founded in 1997, serves early-career playwrights through its residency program, writers’ group, and fellowship programs.
