Eugene O’Neill Theater Center Announces Summer 2003 Season

June 6, 2003 – The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center will offer an abundance of opportunities to partake of theater-in-the-making this summer at their conferences for new work and professional development. Public performances will take place June 13 through August 10 at The O’Neill, located in Waterford on the Long Island Sound, and will include script-in-hand readings of new plays, musicals and puppet theater as well as free guest speakers and open rehearsals.

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 2003 summer season was selected from nearly 900 plays and 150 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.

This year, the O’Neill’s longtime role as the “research and development” center of theater will include the Trustee Residency and Educators Observership programs, started two years ago to allow these important contributors to American theater the chance 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 Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Ben Cameron, composer Willy Schwartz (METAMORPHOSES) 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 debuted at the O’Neill include such notable works as Lee Blessing’s A WALK IN THE WOODS, John Guare’s THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES, Wendy Wasserstein’s UNCOMMON WOMEN AND OTHERS, August Wilson’s MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM and FENCES, AVENUE Q by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty and NINE by Arthur Kopit, Mario Fratti and Maury Yeston.

The O’Neill’s summer activities begin June 2 and run through August 10. To reserve tickets or receive a summer schedule, call the O’Neill Center at 860-443-5378 or the box office at 860-443-1238 (after June 9).