| "We're making a play for tomorrow." |
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| "We're making a play for tomorrow." |
First Seen is a San Francisco Bay Area theatre company/playwright's collective committed to developing and
producing new work
from playwright members and others. Theatrical works (plays) will be staged in various phases of
development - readings through full production.
First Seen is committed to presenting new high-quality theatrical work that deserves to be seen.
We're making a play for tomorrow.
MIKE BURG has directed several plays in New York City and San Francisco, including Othello, Mac Wellman's Dracula. Mike directed the stage reading of To Hades and Back (Again) last July. He is one of the newest Artistic Directors of First Seen, and this is his first non-designer role with the company. Directing Credits also include Oleanna for which he received the Dean Goodman Choice Award. He has designed sets and lighting all over the Bay Area, including sets for First Seen's Trucker Rhapsody, and Unhampered by Sanity, and lights and animation for Katherine Murphy's first play, Greater America. Mike holds a BFA in filmmaking from the Academy of Art College.
SYLVIA KRATINS has worked as an actress, stage manager, company manager and producer in a wide range of theatrical environments. Most recently she was an associate producer at Producers Network in San Francisco. While with Producers Network, she worked on Noises Off, at the Marines Memorial as a co-company manager, company managed Frank Olivier's Twisted Cabaret and Pandemonium Vaudeville Show, managed the Mason Street Theatre, and produced the Jerusalem Lyric Trio at the Florence Gould Theatre at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Theatre Ensemble where she co-wrote and stage managed Siren's Call. Sylvia Kratins has acted in numerous productions, among her favorite roles are Zerbinette in Scapin, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Mistress Sullen in The Beaux Stratagem. She looks forward to performing the role of Cly in First Seen's upcoming production of Kathryn Murphy's To Hades and Back (Again). Sylvia has a bachelor's degree in economics from Mills College and a Certificate in Acting from the Drama Studio, London.
CARY PEPPER has had plays produced in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Edinburgh, among other cities. The Walrus Said won the Religious Arts Guild Playwriting Competition, Come Again, Another Day was a winner in the San Francisco Playwrights Center "DramaRama '90" competition, and The Maltese Frenchman was a finalist for the National Play Award (10 finalists chosen from 850 scripts). Most recently, Anything Can Happen was produced by Newfangled Productions in New York City, and The Faucets of the Law was performed as part of the third Bay Area One-Act Festival (BOA3) in San Francisco. He is represented in print by The Walrus Said (Aran Press), Audition Monologues for Student Actors II (Meriwether Publishing), and Scenes and Monologs from the Best New International Plays (Meriwether Publishing). Cary is a member of the Dramatists Guild, and a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area playwrights group ThroughLine.
ANDRÉA ONSTAD'S plays have been read and performed in theatres throughout the United States and Germany and published in collections by Heinemann. Several short stories have been published in various small venues. Onstad has held artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Ucross, Djerassi and Fundación Valparaíso; has received several Marin Arts Council Grants; been interviewed on radio and taught playwriting at the University of San Francisco and the College of Marin. Onstad has an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and currently lives in an off-the-grid cabin in Northern California.
BRAD ERICKSON, Founding Member and former Co-Artistic Director of First Seen, lives and writes in San Francisco. He was trained at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago (now the Theatre School at DePaul University), where he graduated with BFA in Acting. For ten years Brad worked as an actor in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, winning a Best Actor Award from the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle. More recently, Erickson has focused on playwriting starting with a solo work, A Benediction, which he wrote and performed at The Marsh in San Francisco in 1993. The next year, he was commissioned by Theatre Rhinoceros to help co-write Jumping the Broom, a serio-comic examination of gay and lesbian marriage. The following year, his one-act, Sexual Irregularities, opened Theatre Rhinoceros' mainstage season as part of You and You and You. In 1997, a one-act version of Brad's play Woody & Me was produced by the San Francisco Fringe Festival, and in March of 1999 First Seen produced a full length version of Woody & Me with Erickson performing the play's lead. In 2000, the play won the honor of Best New Script from the Festival of Emerging American Theatre (FEAT); it received its world premier at the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis in July 2001. Erickson's play Public Lives was produced by First Seen in San Francisco in November 2001.
Erickson is currently collaborating with four other artists on a new music theatre work, Burning Louise, which received a developmental reading at Z Space Studio in San Francisco. Burning Louise was seen as a concert reading in the fall of 2003, and will be a workshop production in spring of 2004. Erickson is also currently collaborating with San Francisco conductor and composer, Sanford Dole, on El Cabellero, a new opera based on The Cabellero's Way by O. Henry.
KATHERINE MURPHY lives and works in San Francisco. She received a BA and an MA in Drama, from U.C., Irvine, and San Francisco State University, respectively. While in Los Angeles, Katherine worked with The Los Angeles Theater Collective and The Pacific Shakespeare Company, where she was a founding member of both companies. Since moving to San Francisco, Katherine has divided her time between acting, writing, and directing. She has worked as a Guest Artist at Mills College where she directed Hedda Gabler. She returned in Spring 2001 to direct The Vagina Monologues. Katherine is a company member of the Bare Bones Theatre, where her work includes acting, writing and directing. With this company she has performed in two Beckett pieces and one original work, as well as co-directing and co-writing Cutting Through the Fog. As a director with other companies her work includes a collaborative effort entitled WiseAcres at New Langton Arts and two shows by Harold Pinter for Brown Bag Theatre Company. Katherine continues to train in performance, currently studying with improvisation with Jim Cranna and movement performance wherever she can. Katherine left the Bay Area in the fall of 2000 to work at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to assist John Miller-Stephany on a new adaptation of Jean Anouilh's Léocadia by Jeffrey Hatcher. She also assistant directed with Miller-Stephany at the Guthrie in Fall 2001 on a revival of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. When she returned to San Francisco, Bare Bones and First Seen co-produced the world premiere of Greater America in May 2002. In February of 2003, she played Mina Harker in La Vache Enragee's production of Dracula, adapted by Mac Wellman. Also a founding member of the improv troupe Too Many Larrys, she has performed in San Francisco at The Punchline, Spanganga, The Field, and Sweetie's, and appears regularly at The Marsh's Mock Café and on Liberation Radio. In November 2003, she directed Toni Press-Coffman's Trucker Rhapsody for First Seen at Exit Stage Left. Her latest work, To Hades and Back (Again) was produced by First Seen in 2004 (staged reading) and is scheduled to be produced in 2005 (full production).
The author of 20 plays, TONI PRESS-COFFMAN was born and raised in the Bronx. In 2000, she was awarded a highly competitive NEA/TCG Playwright Residency Award, through which she developed her play, Bodies and Hearts in the Face of the Monster (subsequently re-titled That Slut!) which premiered at Indianapolis's Phoenix Theatre, and was subsequently produced by First Seen at San Francisco's Exit Theatre. In 2001, she conducted a high school theater workshop through which she developed a new play (Divine) with 15 Indianapolis teenagers, which the Phoenix Theatre produced in December 2000.
Her new play Trucker Rhapsody has had staged readings at the Utah Shakespearean Festival, Arizona Theatre Company, and Chicago Dramatists/Famous Door Theatre, and had productions in San Francisco and Indianapolis in 2003.
Press-Coffman's play, Touch, was created with a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, was produced at the 2000 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and is currently under option for a New York production. Touch has won several national playwriting awards and has been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Columbus, Columbia, South Carolina, and Athens, Greece. Her play about Richard III, Two Days of Grace at Middleham, was produced in 1998 at Tucson's Borderlands Theatre. It was subsequently produced in San Francisco in June 2000 and then traveled to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Press-Coffman was one of 12 playwrights from a field of 1400 selected to participate in the 1995 Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference with her play, STAND. STAND received the Herbert and Patricia Brodkin Award, given annually to support the career of an O'Neill Playwright and was selected for the Shipping Dock Theatre's 1996 new play festival. It was produced at the Purple Rose Theatre in its 2002-03 season.
She has had work developed at the Sundance Institute, at the Midwest Professional Playwrights Laboratory, and at Minneapolis' Playlabs. She has received a California Arts Council Playwright's Fellowship; playwriting awards from the Negro Ensemble Theatre Company, the Invisible Theatre, and Wisconsin Women in the Arts; and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Peninsula Community Foundation, and the Shubert Foundation.
Press-Coffman has a BA in Playwriting from UCLA and an MA in Theatre and Film from the University of Connecticut. She has taught Playwriting at the San Francisco School of Dramatic Art/Asian American Theatre, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Stanford University, the University of Kentucky at Lexington, Chatham College, and at the Winona State Prison.
She coordinates the Phoenix Theatre's (Indianapolis) Festival of Emerging American Theatre, and is a founding member of First Seen. She lives, writes, acts, and teaches in Tucson, Arizona.
KERRY REID is a playwright and journalist based in Chicago. Her past stage works include The Last of the Red Hot Dadas, a solo play about the Mother of Dada, the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, which was created for Christina Augello, artistic director of San Francisco's EXIT Theatre. Dadas premiered in May 2002 at the EXIT's DivaFest, and has had two subsequent runs at the EXIT Café and EXIT Stage Left. The play was also presented in 2003 at the Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival, the UNO Festival of Solo Performance at the Intrepid Theatre in Victoria, BC, and at the Montreal Fringe Festival.
Reid wrote another play featuring the Baroness and a contemporary punk rock widow, Unhampered by Sanity, which was produced by First Seen in August 2002. Reid has been a member of First Seen, since 1998. She has also written and performed in two original solo plays. Literal Translations (or, What We Think We Talk About When We Talk About Love) was produced in the 1992 Seattle Fringe Festival, and in Chicago with Splinter Group Theatre Co. and, in the 1993 Rhinoceros Theatre Festival. Gaslighting, based on Joan Abery, England's real-life Miss Havisham (who lived in a garden nest for 35 years after being jilted at the altar), premiered in the Splinter Group 1995 Solopalooza Festival and enjoyed subsequent performances in the 1995 San Francisco Fringe Festival, the 1996 Seattle Fringe Festival, and at The Marsh and Venue 9 in San Francisco. Her original multimedia play about German proto-Expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker and her friendship with Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem for a Friend, appeared in the 1991 Bailiwick Repertory Directors' Festival under Ms. Reid's direction. She has also directed for Chicago's pidgin english productions and A Stage of One's Own, and for the EXIT Theatre's 1999 Absurdist Series, where she directed two seldom-seen pieces by modernist author Djuna (Nightwood) Barnes.
In 2002, Reid was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, a colony for women writers on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. She completed a first draft of Beast in Distress, a play set in the world of the alternative press. Beast received a "First Peek" reading with First Seen in August 2003. She is currently working on a new solo play for Christina Augello based on the life and adventures of 1930s hobo and activist Boxcar Bertha. Her journalism and criticism has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, the East Bay Express, Back Stage West, and American Theatre, among many other publications.
For the past two years, Reid has conducted a weekly writing workshop through the Neighborhood Writing Alliance in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, home to the largest transient population in the city. The workshop participants include many people who have recently transitioned out of homelessness. Under her tutelage, several of the writers have been published in NWA's acclaimed quarterly, The Journal of Ordinary Thought, and one has begun a book-length memoir about her experiences living on the streets.
JEFF SCHWAMBERGER (jeff@jeffrois.com) is a Founding Member of First Seen. He lives and writes in La Honda, California -- the tiny town in the San Francisco Bay Area fleetingly famous as the epicenter of the literary end of the Sixties psychedelic movement, where Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, started his Acid Tests, and hung with the Hell's Angels. Things have calmed down considerably.
Jeff's play A Thin Place in the Universe was staged in 1999 as part of First Seen's first season, after readings at Venue 9 (1998) and the 450 Geary Studio (1997). Gravitation and Ascent received a reading at Damesrocket Theatre in Tucson in 1998 and was presented as a workshop production in First Seen's Spring 2000 Season. In 2002, Gravitation and Ascent was a finalist in the Phoenix Theatre’s Festival of Emerging American Theatre. His play Ourselves, Our Foes was a winner of the American Theatre Ventures National Playwrights Contest and the Sonoma County Playwrights Festival, and was produced by the Actors Theatre of Santa Rosa. He collaborated on The Belle of Bourbon Street, an adaptation of Georges Feydeau's La Dame de Chez Maxim, for TheatreWorks. Jeff's first work, Joshua, was produced in Columbus, Ohio, by The Ohio State University and Cupola when he was a student.
Jeff recently finished a ten-minute play, Ask Ezekiel, and is currently at work on a new play, tentatively titled Stuff I Thought of in My Head, which was given a sneak preview in late 2005 at San Francisco's Off-Market Theatre by C.A.F.E. in The Reading Room.
For details of Jeff's work, visit Doollee.com: http://www.doollee.com/ PlaywrightsS/SchwambergerJeff.htm
Jeff has been a member of the Dramatists Guild since 1993 and a member of Theatre Bay Area since 1992. From 1993 to 2001 he was a member of ThroughLine, a Bay Area playwrights’ group. He was also a participant in TheatreWorks’ New Works Initiative. He has a Ph.D. in Theatre from The Ohio State University and was on the faculty of Ithaca College before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.
We believe that an inherent part of creating a new play is experiencing it on a stage: hearing performers speak the text and seeing the characters brought to life. We also believe that because most theaters select scripts through literary managers or readers who are inundated by scripts (and who, because of sheer volume, are unable to HEAR and SEE the play), the current process of choosing and presenting new theatrical work does not truly serve playwrights, other members of the theater community, or the theater-going public. We have decided to reshape this process and create a new sense of discovery in the theater: one that nurtures playwrights, helps other theater professionals practice their arts, and enriches audiences.
First Seen was created to serve playwrights and new plays. We are committed to our own and to one another's work. We are committed to developing this work as fully as possible, and presenting play in various phases of development - readings through full production. Above all, we are committed to presenting new high-quality theatrical work that deserves to be seen.