2002 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
Announces 2002 Summer Season

May 23, 2002 – Howard Sherman, executive director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center has announced a full slate of readings, workshops and special events for Summer 2002. These will take place June 14 through August 18 at the O’Neill Center, located in Waterford on the Long Island Sound, and will include performances of new plays, musicals and puppet theater.

The O’Neill creates and operates programs that advance new work for the stage and utilizes that work to inform artists and audiences. These include the Puppetry Conference, Playwrights Conference, Critics Institute, Music Theater Conference and the National Theater Institute, a college-accredited training program for theater artists. The O’Neill also owns and operates the Monte Cristo Cottage, childhood home of America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, Eugene O’Neill, and holds an annual celebration honoring the life and works of its namesake every October.

The 2002 summer season was selected from more than 700 plays and 100 musicals. Highly skilled artistic directors and selected conference staff offer formal and informal guidance to the chosen artists, who are encouraged to take risks, deepen their theatrical experience and allow their creative sensibilities to emerge in a rhythm most true to their work. New works are presented as staged readings, without elaborate scenery or costumes, so that the power of the play can come through as it unfolds in front of an audience for the first time. This system is recognized world-wide as the “O’Neill Process.”

Last year, the O’Neill’s longtime role as the “research and development” center of theater expanded to include two new programs, the Trustee Residency and Educators Observership. This year, trustees and teachers will again take part in residencies that allow them to live within the O’Neill’s vibrant community and follow a play from its first reading through its final, script-in-hand performance.

The Playwrights Conference will continue its “All-Conference Series” of lunchtime speakers, featuring playwrights A. R. Gurney and David Henry Hwang, Slam poet Patricia Smith, Moscow Art Theatre Associate Artistic Director Anatoly Smeliansky and many others.

Scores of playwrights, composers, librettists, critics, performers, scholars and students nurtured at the O’Neill Center have gone on to capture varied forms of recognition in the theater arts world, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Academy Award, the Tony Award, the Emmy, the Obie, the Golden Globe, and the Richard Rodgers Award. The O’Neill Theater Center is the winner of a special Tony Award, the National Opera Award, the Jujamcyn Award of Theater Excellence and the Arts and Business Council Encore Award. The seven hundred plays and musicals developed and premiered at the O’Neill include such notable works as John Guare’s THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES, Wendy Wasserstein’s UNCOMMON WOMEN AND OTHERS, August Wilson’s MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES and THE PIANO LESSON, Lee Blessing’s A WALK IN THE WOODS, and NINE by Arthur Kopit, Mario Fratti and Maury Yeston.

O’Neill performances and special events will be open to the public June 14 through August 18. To reserve tickets or receive a summer brochure, call the O’Neill Center at 860-443-5378 or the box office at 860-443-1238 (after June 11).