Get to know the 2009 finalists, whose plays are being produced.
Ted Weesner, Jr. | |
| Ted is a writer based in Somerville, Massachusetts, whose work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Memorious, Gastronomica, Glamour, The Boston Globeand on National Public Radio. His story "Tuscaloosa," featured in Ploughshares' Emerging Writers issue, was a Best American Short StoriesNotable selection. He has been the recipient of a PEN/New England Discovery Award, grants from the St. Botolph Club and Somerville Arts Council, and a residency at the MacDowell Colony. His critical essays about The Catcher in the Ryeare included in Scribner's American Writer and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Tufts and The Museum School, and is completing a novel about expatriates living in 1990s' Prague. Ted grew up in New Hampshire, attended college in Connecticut (Trinity) and graduate school in Boston (Emerson). Before making Somerville his home, Ted lived in Manhattan and in Prague (in the early ‘90s, teaching English and writing for the Prague Post). The King Size is his first play. |
Ted Weesner, Jr. |
Dale Bruton | |
| Dale is a self-exiled Anglophobic Englander. Like countless speakers of the same mother tongue, he ambles through Prague apparently teaching English. He also scribbles tomes that remain largely unread (cue plug for www.dalebruton.com and its cobwebbed guestbook). In a cockeyed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance vein, his education came largely from long years of unemployment contrasted against long days of blue collar shifts, almost inescapable depression and significant experimentation with drugs. He is a fan of horror and punk, and long ago realized seriousness is something for which there is no worthy excuse. Forced Entry is a play about what at first appears to be a straightforward burglary which soon develops into something more sinister and out of control. Apart from thinking the play's title and 'by' and the author's name would look mildly funny in print, like almost everything Dale has written the idea came spontaneously, developed a page at a time, and became a race against the deadline with a not quite satisfying result. But, whatever and all, he hopes the audience enjoy all three of the evening's plays. | Dale Bruton |
David Fisher | |
British-born philosophy graduate David Fisher found himself in Prague shortly after the 1989 revolution. Unsatisfied with working as an English teacher, Fisher had a revolutionary idea: use the theatre to make English teaching more exciting. After fourteen years, the Bear Educational Theater project has put on 330 performances last year, has expanded from the Czech Republic to Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and the UK. And performances since their humble start are fast approaching 2,000 curtain calls, seen by some 160,000 students. | David Fisher |
