6.5.09     Alum Demond Green Earns Drama Desk Nomination

 Texas State Student Wins National Playwriting Award

            Texas State theatre student A. John Boulanger was recently announced as the winner of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival National Student Playwriting Award for his play House of Several Stories. The play was first produced last fall in a co-production by the Texas State Department of Theatre and Dance and Austin theatre company The Search Party. It was selected as one of seven shows to be presented at the Regional Festival hosted by Texas State during the last week of February.

            The Regional Festival was attended by a national selection team who viewed fifty-six shows from eight regions across the country, and House of Several Stories was selected as one of only four shows to be presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. This is the first time Texas State has had a show advance to the Kennedy Center.

            House of Several Stories is a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family and their unusual guests. It is about how stories (whether true, false, or borrowed) help us fill the vacuums in our lives caused by death, loss, and dysfunction.

            As winner of the National Student Playwriting Award, Boulanger receives a $2500 prize, membership in the Dramatists Guild, a publishing option with Samuel French, contacts with literary agents, and a month-long summer residency at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory. Recent winners of the award have been from UCLA, UC-Santa Barbara, and Boston University. Earlier recipients include Pulitzer-Prize winner Paula Vogel, Tony-nominated playwright Lee Blessing, and James Leonard, who won the award for his play The Diviners.

            Boulanger received his B.F.A. in Directing from Texas State in 2005 and will graduate this May with his M.A. in playwriting. The cast of House of Several Stories features Texas State voice professor Melissa Grogan, and undergraduate students Ashley Rhodes, Travis Hackett, Kenneth Hill, and Ragan Rhodes. The production team features Texas State students Abbey Moore Graf (costumes), Vanessa Velasquez (scenery), and Lara Willars (stage manager) as well as Texas State alum Chris McKnight (lighting), and Daniel Schaetz and Adam Smith (sound). House of Several Stories was directed by Texas state alum Jeremy Torres who co-founded The Search Party with Smith and Teresa Mikulastik.

            House of Several Stories will be performed in the Family Theatre at the Kennedy Center on Saturday April 18 at 7:30. It is the culminating event of the week-long National Festival.

Demond Green (Black Dude) Demond Green most recently appeared in George Street Playhouse’s production of The Toxic Avenger: The Musical, for which he received a 2009 Drama Desk nominee for best Featured Actor in a Musical. Other regional credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (McCarter Theatre/Paper Mill Playhouse), Two Gentlemen of Verona (Baltimore CenterStage), The Wiz (La Jolla Playhouse), The 25th Annual Putman County Spelling Bee (Barrington Stage/North Shore), European Tour: Hair. TV/Film: “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” The Peep Show. Mr. Green holds a B.F.A in Drama and Classical performance from Texas State University and has also studied with both the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. www.myspace.com/demondsmusic.

EMILY NEVES is a 2008 – 2009 Alley Theatre Company member. She was last seen at the Alley in The Farnsworth Invention (Pem Farnsworth/ Ensemble), Rock 'N' Roll (Esme/Alice), The Man Who Came to Dinner (June), A Christmas Carol (Belle/Fred's Wife), Cyrano de Bergerac (Prostitute/ Musician/ Sister Claire), and understudied the role of Janis Joplin (speaking) in last season's Love, Janis. Other theatre credits include The Emperor's New Clothes (Princess Liane) with The Houston Children's Theatre Festival, Broadway 2000 and Broadway 2001 (Featured Performer, both directed by Anne Reinking at the Tampa Bay performing Arts Center). Emily recently starred in the short film MagCrew (Addison), which will be featured at the Arpa Film Festival in Hollywood this October. As a singer, Emily was featured as a Hollywood semi-finalist on season four of American Idol, and will be featured this fall on the spin-off series American Idol: Rewind. Educational Credits include two summers of intensive study at Anne Reinking's Broadway Theatre Project, where she worked with such artists as Gwen Verdon, Ben Vereen and Patti Lupone. She studied in the B.F.A Pre-Professional Apprenticeship Program at Texas State University. Her work there in Transposing Shakespeare (Ingenue) and Hay Fever (Sorrel Bliss) earned her nominations for the Irene Ryan Scholarship (2002, 2003).