AMPLIFY: A Playwright's Voice

A revelation of three NYC premieres celebrating the work of one exciting writer.

Presented in all three of our spaces by 3 non-profit theater companies who will receive our *All-Inclusive licensing package. Formerly known as VOLT.

AMPLIFY 2024: Playwright Chisa Hutchinson

Chisa Hutchinson (BA Vassar College; MFA NYU - TSoA) has presented her plays, which include She Like Girls, Somebody’s Daughter, Surely Goodness & Mercy, Whitelisted, and Dead & Breathing at such venues as Atlantic Theater Company, Contemporary American Theater Festival, the National Black Theatre, Second Stage, and Arch 468 in London. Her radio drama, Proof of Love, can be found on Audible (with a boss rating). She’s been a New Dramatist, a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a Lark Fellow, a Humanitas Fellow, a NeoFuturist, and a staff writer for the Blue Man Group. Chisa has also won a GLAAD Award, a Lilly Award, a New York Innovative Theatre Award, a Helen Merrill Award, and the Lanford Wilson Award. She staffed on two television series: Three Women (Starz) and Tell Me Lies (Hulu). Meanwhile, her first original feature, The Subject, in which a white documentarian deals with the moral fallout from exploiting the death of a black teen, is available on various VOD platforms after a successful film festival circuit during which it won over 30 prizes. To learn more, visit www.chisahutchinson.com.

Click here for more info on the shows in this year's festival.

VOLT 2022: Playwright Karen Hartman

Karen Hartman (Playwright) is a recent Guggenheim Fellow whose plays have been celebrated as passionate, relevant storytelling that “resonate in the current moment with overpowering force” (Variety). She wrote the book for a new musical Rattlesnake Kate, score by Neyla Pekarek, premiering February 2022 at the Denver Center. Three critically acclaimed recent works—Roz and Ray (Edgerton New Play Prize), The Lucky Star (under the title The Book of Joseph), and Project Dawn (NEA Art Works Grant, NNPN Rolling World Premiere)—had ten productions around the country and are published by Samuel French/Concord. She is developing Project Dawn for Population Media Center as a television series, and has another project in the works with 20th Television. Hartman’s Good Faith: Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department premiered at Yale Repertory Theater in 2019. Her prose has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. A New Dramatists alumna and former Playwrights Center McKnight Fellow, Princeton Hodder Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar, Hartman served as Senior Artist-in-Residence at University of Washington School of Drama for five years and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Pictured: Ricardy Fabre and Claire Siebers in NEW GOLDEN AGE (2022) by Karen Hartman and directed by Jade King Carroll. Presented by Primary Stages. Photo by Carol Rosegg.