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My good friend Peter Roth did something quite exceptional yesterday, well, he had probably been working on it and thinking about it for a bit longer, nevertheless, yesterday evening he convened the first meeting of the Manhattan Project.

By his own description:

Between 1942 and 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer gathered the most brilliant minds of the age at Los Alamos, New Mexico to create something magnificent and terrifying. The Manhattan Project – Cleveland Lab seeks to do the same for the Cleveland stage.

Based on the Theatre Lab model taught at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and inspired by The Brooklyn Generator in New York, The Manhattan Project wants to introduce Cleveland actors and playwrights to each other by organizing a monthly production of brand new 10-minute plays.

Participating artists will meet early in the month and will be broken into teams, each with one playwright. The playwright will then be given a writing prompt to write a new 10-minute play based on the prompt and including all the team’s actors. The rest of the evening the team members will get to know each other and get a feel for each other’s skills and voices.

The teams will reconvene later in the month to perform these plays for each other.

These 10-minute plays are not an end in themselves. Through these small collaborations we hope to build relationships between the two most vulnerable artists in theatre; the actors who put themselves on stage and the playwrights who pour themselves onto the page. Perhaps these 10-minute plays will grow into longer works or maybe these collaborations will become partnerships on larger projects.

I am pleased that Peter invited me and that I am one of six inaugural writers. Upwards of twenty people showed up last night and all were enthusiastic. This is an exciting project and will only grow with time.

If you want to participate, please RSVP at TrinityCrater@gmail.com.

The first performance will be Monday, May 6, at 8:00pm at Mahall’s on Madison Avenue, which is a kick-ass venue with a good beer selection.

Rock-on, Peter!

This year’s NEOMFA Playwright festival will be at convergence-continuum‘s Liminis theater.

The 2012 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival features thesis productions of Plant Life by Mike Williams, Directed by Geoffrey Hoffman and Nothing Funny by Jarod Witkowsk, directed by Clyde Simon, at The Liminis. Plant Life will run Thursday, February 2 – Saturday, February 4 and Nothing Funny will run Thursday, February 9 – Saturday, February 11. All shows are at 8:00pm.

“These plays are the culminating experience of three years of intensive study,” says playwright and professor Mike Geither; the plays are co-produced by Convergence Continuum, NEOMFA and Cleveland State University.

The Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (NEOMFA) is a consortium of Cleveland State University, Kent State University, The University of Akron, and Youngstown State University that allows students to take classes on four different campuses and earn a degree from a single unified writing program. Emerging writers may study in four genres – creative non-fiction, fiction, playwriting and poetry – and take advantage of the resources offered on all four campuses. Since its inception in 2005, the NEOMFA has offered small-group workshops, open readings, summer travel fellowships, and high-profile visiting writers, in addition to career-preparing internships, competitive graduate funding, and a diverse Midwestern landscape that tempts the creative eye.

More info can be found at the neomfaplaywright website.