We are interested in material that runs no longer than 90 minutes and can be performed as a one act. Any genre or style will be met with equal consideration.

All scripts should be submitted to zerohour.director@gmail.com no later than September 30, 2010. Scripts will be reviewed by the Board of Directors and one play will be chosen to produce in the summer of 2011. We will assign you a dramaturg to help with script development and rewrites in order to make your show the best that it can be, and that process will take place throughout the fall and winter.

Rough drafts are acceptable, so don’t hesitate to send them! We are not able to compensate writers at this time, but we will supply funding to cover the workshop and production fees. We look forward to reading your work, and thank you for checking out Zero Hour Theatre!

Mike Meagher is 2004 graduate of Washington College with a BA in Drama and History. He is currently a middle school teacher in the District of Columbia, where he also runs a Drama Club. Mike has played many parts in his life including a dead Laertes, a transvestite singer, a drunken professor with a French-German-Russian accent, and a technical director for Zero Hour Theatre (perhaps he’s said too much). Also, he dabbles in writing for Crunchable. Most recently, his play The Foley Artist was performed as part of the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival. He resides in Columbia, MD with his wife and his insatiable yen for cookies.

Did you like it enough to vote for it at http://dctheatrescene.com/?

Go to the right hand side of the page and vote away. Haven’t seen the show yet? One more chance at 3:30 today.

DC Theatre Scene

Washington City Paper

DCist

Three more shows remain this Wednesday @ 10 pm, Saturday @ 10 pm, and Sunday @ 3:30 pm. Come see this “morbidly fascinating” show for yourself.

Playwright: Stephen Spotswood
Director: Tess Pohlhaus

Cast, in order of appearance:

HANNAH: Aileen Brenner
BEA: Maggie Brevig
EUNEY: Molly Weeks Crumbley
STANLEY: Mike Meagher (for the first four shows)/Andrew Yanek (for the last three)
CHARLES: Rachel Loose
MR. NODDY: Kevin Brotzman

In the meantime, meet the director of the show!

Tess is a 2003 graduate of Washington College, with a BA in Drama and Secondary Teaching Certification (so she is employable). She currently lives in Bel Air, MD and teaches theatre at Rising Sun High School in “nearby” Cecil County. (She realizes that Cecil County is actually nowhere nearby to pretty much anything.) At RSHS, Tess has directed a plethora of plays and musicals including (in no particular order) Little Shop of Horrors, You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown, Kiss Me Kate, and The Importance of Being Earnest. She has also appeared in Amadeus as Constanze Weber, Dracula as Lucy Seward, Father Joy as Abigail at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in Zero Hour Theatre’s production of The Frustrations of Stoker Pratt as Mrs. Troeffel at the 2008 Capital Fringe Festival. Tess has no free time, but if she did she would probably sleep and read lots of good books.

Here’s what the press has to say so far–from the Washington College News site:

Molly Weeks Crumbley ’07 knew she would miss her drama family, the tight-knit group of Washington College theater majors and professors she spent all those hours with in Tawes Theatre building sets, rehearsing, critiquing. “The department fostered a real sense of community,” she says. “We all did a little bit of everything while we were there. And upon graduating, we realized very quickly that there just wasn’t a place like that in the real world.”

So Crumbley and several drama friends created their virtual “place like that”—a new theater troupe that would bring like-minded people together to stage new works or reinterpret older plays. She and 2003 graduate Tess Pohlhaus would share the role of artistic director, and ’07 Sophie Kerr Prize winner Liam Daley would write the script their first production. The Board would include technical director Mike Meagher ’04, marketing director Kevin Brotzman ’04, and business director Michael Ridgaway ’05. They would all keep their day jobs and fit theater into evenings, weekends and summer vacations.

Three years later, Zero Hour Theatre is producing its third play for the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C., and the connections to Washington College couldn’t be stronger. The dark comedy 7 Lessons on Suicide, which opens Friday at Goethe Institut-Gallery, in D.C.’s Chinatown, was written by Stephen Spotswood, Washington College class of 1999. The playwright and Zero Hour held a workshop reading of the play in April on the Chestertown campus, where they encouraged their former professors and other audience members to critique and improve it for the next draft.

The play is directed by Pohlhaus, and six of the seven actors on stage are Washington College alums, too: Crumbley, Brotzman and Meagher are joined by Rachel Loose ’07, Aileen Brenner ’09, and former student Andrew Yanek. The seventh part is taken by Maggie Brevig, a Boston College grad and a good friend of Molly. There’s a Wellesley grad serving as dramaturg, but she’s engaged to ZHT business director Ridgaway 05. It’s not really deliberate, all this Washington College-ness, says Pohlhaus, “Last year, only three of seven actors were Washington College alums.”

Crumbley describes 7 Lessons as “a pitch-black comedy that asks, ‘In a world where everyone is clamoring to end it all, why bother living?’ ” Though it bills itself as a show about suicide, it is ultimately a show about choosing life, she adds. “It’s a very, very dark comedy,” director Pohlhaus confirms. “It deals with very serious issues in a deeply comedic way and with a lot of heart. We want the audience to leave the theater with a lot to think and talk about.”

Playwright Spotswood, who earned his MFA in playwriting at Catholic University, received the first Washington College Alumni Horizons Ribbon last fall in recognition of his early career accomplishments. He says working with the Zero Hour crew on 7 Lessons allowed him to get down to business faster. “When working with any theater company, there’s this feeling-out period that takes place, coming to an understanding about how the process will work and how each side sees their role,’’ he explains. “Basically, learning how to work with and communicate with each other. With Zero Hour, not only do we know how to communicate and work with each other already, we’ve all had the same theater training. We all come from a background that emphasizes collaboration and role-sharing instead of compartmentalization.”

The cast and crew have been rehearsing in homes and won’t be able to set up even the first light or prop until the afternoon of opening day. That’s the nature of the Capital Fringe Festival, where dozens of productions happen simultaneously in creative venues all over the city. Pohlhaus, who teaches drama at Rising Sun High School in Cecil County, says the Washington College theater curriculum prepared her and her colleagues well for such rigors. “We are all so used to working in all facets of the theater, from script writing to set design and acting, that we really understand the process and can adapt pretty fast. For thesis productions, we were staging a show a week,” she continues. We couldn’t build the set until Sunday, and we had our first rehearsal in front of faculty on Monday. That gave us a few days to make improvements and react to their suggestions, then we staged the plays Friday night and Saturday.”

Zero Hour Theatre will stage Stephen Spotswood’s 7 Lessons on Suicide at the Goethe Institut-Gallery,
812 7th Street N.W.,
Washington, DC 20001 on the following dates and times: Friday, July 16, 9 p.m.;
Saturday, July 17, 4:30 p.m.;
Sunday, July 18, 7 p.m.;
Tuesday, July 20, 8:30 p.m.;
Wednesday, July 21, 10 p.m.;
Saturday, July 24, 10 p.m., and 
Sunday, July 25, 3:30 p.m. For more information about Zero Hour Theatre and the current production, visit the website (designed, of course by a Washington College alumnus, Kate Amann ’06): http://www.zerohourtheatre.com.