SPEECH & DEBATE on Screen (on iTunes)

A film version of Stephen Karam's Speech & Debate is now available to rent through iTunes. Karam wrote the screenplay for the film based on his own play, which opened Off-Broadway in 2007 as part of the Roundabout Underground initiative.

Speech & Debate, the play, has been well-performed since then, including at Urbana's Station Theater in 2008 and at Illinois State University in 2011.

Speech & Debate involves three teenagers in Oregon, none of whom exactly fit in. Diwata is overflowing with the desire to PERFORM!, Howie is gay and looking for a way to express that at a hostile school and Solomon sees himself as a crusading journalist. Together, they revive their school's moribund debate club to expose the hypocrisy and perfidy of the adults around them. By turns, they're funny, wounded and outrageous, especially when they perform a musical with a witch from The Crucible time-traveling to meet a gay, teenage version of Abraham Lincoln.

Sarah Steele, an actress you may recognize from her role as Marissa Gold on The Good Wife, played Diwata in that Roundabout production ten years ago, and she is back as Diwata for the movie. She's joined by Liam James (The Family) as Solomon and Austin P. McKenzie (he played Melchior in the Deaf West production of Spring Awakening on Broadway) as Howie.

Karam and director Dan Harris have opened up the stage play, which showed only the three high school students and one adult, at least far enough to include space for actors like Skylar Astin, Roger Bart, Janeane Garolfolo, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Kal Penn, Gideon Glick (who played Howie in the original production), and Lin-Manuel Miranda as part of the tableau.

All that, for $3.99 on iTunes.

Zinnie Harris and Stephen Karam Honored with 2015 Berwin Lee Awards

Playwrights Zinnie Harris and Stephen Karam were announced last week as the second-ever winners of the Berwin Lee Playwrights Award. Trustees Dorothy Berwin, Mark Lee and Tom Kirdahy made the announcement, and BroadwayWorld.com notes that "The Berwin Lee Award was created to foster and promote the craft of playwriting in both the United States and the United Kingdom and to encourage the writing and production of plays."

For this award, the trustees are looking for playwrights whose work has not yet been produced on Broadway or in London's West End. They have chosen one American winner -- Pennsylvania native Karam -- and one winner from the United Kingdom -- Harris, who currently resides in Edinburgh -- and each received a prize of $25,000 as part of the award. Those monies were offered as a commission of sorts, to allow the selected playwrights the time and freedom they need to write whatever they want, no strings attached.

Both playwrights are rising stars on both sides of the Atlantic, with Harris's The Wheel, a play originally commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland, enjoying a major Chicago production starring Joan Allen at Steppenwolf; and Karam's Sons of the Prophet nominated for a 2012 Pulitzer Prize and staged at the Roundabout in a production that catapulted Santino Fontana into stardom.

On a personal note, both playwrights are particular favorites of mine. Harris's Further Than the Furthest Thing and Karam's Speech & Debate, which is like a prequel to Glee before there was a Glee, have landed in my "wish pile."

Here are the official bios released with the award news:

Playwright Zinnie Harris

Zinnie Harris is a playwright and theatre director. Her celebrated early play Further Than the Furthest Thing (which toured from the Traverse theatre to the National Theatre) won her the Peggy Ramsay Playwriting and John Whiting Award in 2001. Her most recent play, How to Hold Your Breath, premiered at the Royal Court Jerwood downstairs in 2015. Other plays include The Wheel (2011, National Theatre of Scotland), which won a Fringe First; an adaptation of A Doll's House (2009, Donmar Warehouse); Midwinter (2004, RSC), which won an Arts Foundation Fellowship Prize for Playwriting; and By Many Wounds (1999, Hampstead Theatre). Zinnie's television work includes two 90 minute dramas for Channel 4, Born With Two Mothers and Richard Is My Boyfriend; episodes for the BBC One Drama Series SPOOKS; and work as lead writer on the series Partners in Crime (based on the Agatha Christie novels Tommy and Tuppence), for Endor / BBC 1 (to be broadcast in 2015), starring David Walliams.

Pllaywright Stephen Karam

Stephen Karam is the author of Sons of the Prophet, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of the 2012 Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and Hull-Warriner Awards for Best Play. Other plays include Speech & Debate (the inaugural production of Roundabout Underground), columbinus, and Dark Sisters, an original chamber opera with composer Nico Muhly. His new play, The Humans, premiered in Chicago at American Theater Company and will open in New York at Roundabout Theatre Company in October of 2015. Stephen is a MacDowell Colony fellow, and the recipient of the inaugural Sam Norkin Drama Desk Award. Born and raised in Scranton, PA, he's a graduate of Brown University.

Last year's winners in the first year of the Berwin Lee Awards were Bathsheba Doran from the United States and Lucy Kirkwood from the UK. 

Auditions December 2 and 4 for SONS OF THE PROPHET in Urbana

Area actors need to warm up those monologues! Illinois State University is in the middle of auditions for all its winter and spring shows right this minute, and Heartland Theatre is holding auditions for Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still in mid-December. Plus Community Players' will be looking for performers for Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor December 10 and 11.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, December 2 and Monday, December 3, Urbana's Station Theatre will hold auditions for Sons of the Prophet, a new comedy-drama from playwright Stephen Karam. A finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sons of the Prophet was billed as "a refreshingly honest take on how we cope with wounds that just won't heal" when it played at New York's Roundabout Theatre. The Roundabout's poster for the show -- with its garden gnome sporting a black eye -- was so adorable I'm posting it here just for kicks. That production was quite successful, amassing lots of wins and nominations for Obies, Lucille Lortel Awards, Drama Desks and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Lead actor Santino Fontana was especially well received.

The Station has picked up the Roundabout's material on the play for their audition flyer, with this description: "If to live is to suffer, then Joseph Douaihy is more alive than most. With unexplained chronic pain and the fate of his reeling family on his shoulders, Joseph's health, sanity, and insurance premium are on the line. In an age when modern medicine has a cure for just about everything, Sons of the Prophet is the funniest play about human suffering you're likely to see."

Karam's play's title refers to Kahlil Gibran's book "The Prophet," with the play's action organized around the chapter headings in that poetic piece of pop philosophy. Joseph Douaihy is one of two brothers in the play, the older at 29, with Charles only 18. The family is Lebanese-American and claims a distant familial connection to Gibran, which informs part of the plot when Joseph is pushed to write a book himself, but is challenged by his own mysterious illness and his mentally unstable editor, who also happens to be his boss and therefore holds the key to his health insurance.

Joseph, who is gay, lives with Charles, who is also gay, and their ornery uncle in a not-at-all nice area of Pennsylvania, thrown together after Bill Douaihy, Joseph and Charlie's dad, passes away. How he dies is important, but tricky to explain. It seems a local football player left a fake deer on the highway as a prank, Bill saw it while driving and swerved to avoid it, had a crash, and then died a week later in the hospital. But he died of a heart attack. It's all part of Karam's inquiry into the crazy nature of Fate or Luck or Destiny or whatever you want to call it, as those cosmic forces keep ladling out big helpings of bad news to the Douaihy family. If the family is drowning in tragedy, what sets Sons of the Prophet apart is the comedy, and how Joseph and his kin manage to find a life raft in humor and in each other.

Sons of the Prophet will be directed by Gary Ambler for the Station Theatre, with performances from February 21 to March 9. Roles available include Joseph, Charlie and Uncle Bill, as well as Vin, the 18-year-old football star who caused the accident; Gloria, 59, the crazy editor; and Timothy, a local TV reporter who offers romantic complications for Joseph.

Auditions, which will consist of cold readings from the script, will be held at the Station Theatre at 223 North Broadway in Urbana on Sunday, December 2, from 2 to 5 pm and Monday, December 3, from 7 to 10 pm. For more information, you are asked to email Gary Ambler at garysambler@gmail.com

Station Theatre Announces New Season

Urbana's Station Theatre has a pattern of announcing their new season at their annual end-of-previous-season banquet. That banquet, celebrating the Station's 40th season (see image below -- it's the last time we'll see it!), happened yesterday, and before the evening ended, the 2012-13 schedule had indeed been unveiled.

You can take a look at the seven shows that make up the Station's 41st season here, with the first one, Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive," beginning October 4, to be directed by Thom Schnarre. "How I Learned to Drive" is an intense, disturbing look at incest, as we see how sexuality, family dysfunction, control and society's mixed messages about what it means to be a girl combine to damage a young woman named Li'l Bit. Even her name tells the story, as she is juvenilized and sexualized at the same time. "How I Learned to Drive" earned a host of Obie, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards for its 1997 Off-Broadway production; it also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998.

Next up is Shakespeare's "Hamlet," directed by Mathew Green. Although I haven't seen Shakespeare at the Station recently, it has certainly been done there, with an Eastern European "Macbeth" in 1994 and a zombified  "Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1995. They also did "The Comedy of Errors" in 1991, and the zippy hip-hop take called "The Bombitty of Errors" in 2008. "Hamlet" is a different kettle of fish, and it will be interesting to see what Green does with it in terms of setting and style. And who will play Hamlet? We'll all find out when "Hamlet" runs from November 1 to 17.

There is just something about three sisters that gets playwrights moving. "Independence," by Lee Blessing, is another in a series of theatrical three-sister plays ("King Lear," "Three Sisters," "Crimes of the Heart," etc.) I'd like to see in repertory some day, with the same actresses playing all the different sets of sisters. Deb Richardson will direct "Independence Day," which follows three sisters in Independence, Iowa, trying to handle a mother who may or may not be crazy, for the Station, with performances from November 29 to December 5.

The controversial (and boisterous, farcical and generally over-the-top) rock musical "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" will open 2013 at the Station, running January 17 to February 2, in a production to be directed by Mikel J. Matthews, Jr., who just finished up with their very well-received production of "Rent." With music and lyrics by Michael Friedman and book by Alex Timbers, "Bloody, Bloody" is a highly fictionalized "rowdy political carnival*" about U.S. President Andrew Jackson and his rise to fame. The show angered Native American groups during its run at New York's Public Theatre, after which it transferred to Broadway, anyway, but then languished at the box office. It's a provocative, outrageous show, mixing sex-fueled rock-star moves with skewed American history in the most cynical, satirical way.

Stephen Karam's "Sons of the Prophet," directed by Gary Ambler, follows, opening on February 21. "Sons of the Prophet," a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, involves a Lebanese-American family supposedly related to Kahlil Gibran, who wrote the bestseller "The Prophet." One of the two sons in the title is inexplicably ill with wounds that just won't heal, leading the Roundabout Theatre to bill "Sons of the Prophet" as "the funniest play about human suffering you're likely to see." Karam has a unique voice in modern American theater, and his "Speech and Debate" played at the Station back in 2009.

Kay Bohannon Holley will direct another piece with historical and sexual hijinks afoot in "Or," by Liz Duffy Adams, who bills herself as a "playwright interested in the poetics common to classical and experimental theater." Playwright, spy and feminist trailblazer Aphra Behn is at the center of "Or," which juggles Behn's desperate need to finish a play along with the demands of three insistent lovers (Nell Gwynne, King Charles II and a spy named William Scot) and the hoped-for end of her espionage game. Time-bending, cross-dressing and double-dealing, "Or" was hailed as "an Aphra-disiac valentine" by Time Out NY. It will run from March 28 to April 13 at the Station.

Closing out the season is "Next to Normal," the Broadway musical about a family breaking into pieces because of the mother's bipolar disorder and her subsequent struggles with treatment. Brian Yorkey wrote the book and lyrics, while Tom Kitt composed the music for "Next to Normal," which surprised a lot of people when it won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize after not being on the shortlist recommended to the Pulitzer committee. It also won Tony Awards for its score, orchestrations and lead actress Alice Ripley. The Station's longtime Artistic Director Rick Orr will direct "Next to Normal," which will open April 25 and close May 11.

Ticket prices range from $10 to $15 for performances at the Station, which all begin at 8 pm. For more information on the 2012-13 season, click here.

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* The phrase "rowdy political carnival" comes from Ben Brantley's review in the New York Times. 

Please note that the images shown here for individual shows are taken from previous productions or movie versions of these shows and may not reflect the Station Theatre's approach to the material.