David Lee White is a New Jersey based writer that has written several plays familiar to audiences throughout the state. His play Blood: A Comedywas been produced at Passage Theatre (2009) and Dreamcatcher Rep (2012). David also worked with Passage's Artistic Director June Ballinger to create the mainstage shows Trenton Lights and Profiles, which made use of interviews with Trenton residents on the topics of race, identity and history in Trenton, NJ. His play Slippery as Sin also received its world premiere at Passage in 2011. The one-act play White Baby was originally produced at Passage Theatre, then at Emerging Artists Theatre in NY. He is currently working on the musical Live Stream with singer/songwriter Sarah Donner and director/co-creator Adam Immerwahr. The piece has been workshopped twice at Bristol-Riverside Theatre as part of their "America Rising" series. His newest play Real True Crime will receiving a reading in the Hive Exposed series in NY this March, and his solo show Panther Hollow will be seen at Dreamcatcher Rep, Drexel University and the United Solo Festival in the NY in the Fall of 2015. Since 2005, he has been creating oral-history based plays with Trenton area teens based on social and cultural issues. If I Could In My Hood I Would... was about inner-city gangs, Fire Girls took on the issue of girl-bullying and Urban Central examined the 1967 race riots that took place a Trenton Central High. Subsequent shows in this vein include Get Off the Bus and the upcoming Bobashela. He created "Stoop Theatre" with the Trenton High drama club and created the show This Trenton Life which was the subject an Emmy-Award nominated broadcast on PCK Media's State of the Arts. David Lee White is the Associate Artistic Director and Resident Playwright at Passage Theatre in Trenton, NJ He also runs the Passage Play Lab which has aided in the development of plays by New Jersey-based playwrights. David is also the curator of the Rider University New Play Festival, a playwriting instructor at Play Penn in Philadelphia and teaches Dramatic Analysis at Drexel University.
COMMISSIONED PLAY: Despite a myriad of new treatments for mental illnesses such as bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, many sufferers continue to live on the margins of the society and continue to be victims due to the stigmas surrounding mental illness. Sanism will be based on interviews with people who have suffered, or are currently suffering, from mental illness as well as their families, health care workers, and service organizations. The play will attempt to grapple with the question of what it takes to overcome taboos and get victims the treatment they need..
Nikkole Salter is an OBIE Award-winning actress and dramatist. Her plays include In The Continuum (NY Outer Critics Circle's John Gassner Award for Best New American Play, 2006; Helen Hayes Award, 2007), Repairing a Nation, Of Great Merit, Carnaval, Lines in the Dust and Freedom Riders. Ms. Salter is a 2014 MAP Fund Grant recipient, a Theatre Hall of Fame Seldes-Kanin Fellowship awardee, and a recipient of the Global Tolerance Award from the Friends of the United Nations. Ms. Salter is also co-founder of The Continuum Project, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that creates innovative artistic programming for community empowerment and enrichment. Their primary endeavor, The Legacy Program: Residency - a youth development initiative that uses the arts to reconnect descendants of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade to the specificity of their African ancestry - was featured on the PBS series, "Finding Your Roots," hosted by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Ms. Salter is an active member of the Actors Equity Association, the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the Dramatists Guild. She received her BFA in theatre from Howard University and her MFA from New York University's Graduate Acting Program under the tutelage of Zelda Fichandler and Ron Van Lieu.
COMMISSIONED PLAY: Ms. Salter's play focuses on the Native American population in New Jersey. When a NJ school refuses to get rid of it's "Indian" mascot, one woman takes up the charge to have it removed. But when the community divides over its support of the school's traditional totem murals, 'dancing Indian' coat of arms and the annual Tomahawk themed dance, the task proves easier said than done.
Chisa Hutchinson with Playwrights Theater of NJ (of Madison, NJ)Stage Exchange Reading on Friday June 24, 2016 at NJPAC
Having never even seen a play until high school, Chisa Hutchinson caught up mighty fast by earning a B.A. in Dramatic Arts from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She has since been commissioned to write several plays and has even written a few just for kicks, including Dirt Rich (SummerStage), She Like Girls (the Lark Play Development Center, Working Man's Clothes Productions), This Is Not the Play (Mad Dog Theater Company, Cleveland Public Theater), Sex On Sunday (the Lark Play Development Center, the BE Company), Tunde's Trumpet (SummerStage, BOOM Arts), The Subject (Atlantic Theater Company, Playwrights' Foundation, Victory Gardens, Partial Comfort, and Rattlestick Theater) , Mama's Gonna Buy You (WorkShop Theater Company, Inge Center for the Arts), and Somebody's Daughter (Cherry Lane), Alondra Was Here (the Wild Project), and Dead & Breathing (the Lark Play Development Center, Contemporary American Theater Festival). Chisa has been a Lark Fellow, a Dramatist Guild Fellow, a Resident at the William Inge Center for the Arts, a staff writer for the Blue Man Group and an ensemble member of the New York NeoFuturists. She has served on the Artistic Cabinet of the Lark Play Development Center since 2009. She has been a two-time finalist for the Weissberger Award, a finalist for the Heideman and a finalist for the highly coveted PONY Fellowship. She actually wins awards sometimes, too, like the GLAAD Award she got for her play, She Like Girls, the John Golden Award for Excellence in Playwriting, a Lilly Award for Most Outstanding Playwright at the Beginning of Her Career, a New York Innovative Theatre Award, a Paul Green Award, a Helen Merrill Award and most recently a Lanford Wilson Award. To pay the loans she took out for those aforementioned degrees, Chisa writes copy for a retail company that targets spunky, discount-loving sexagenarians. She is currently a proud member of New Dramatists.
COMMISSIONED PLAY: Tino, a brilliant, but shy elementary student in Newark has lived with his guardian, an abusive aunt, since his mother disappeared some years ago. Bernadette, a cantankerous old lunch lady who is not fond of children, has taken a liking to him. When Bernadette is diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disorder, their friendship becomes the only way out of their impossible predicaments. Together, they confront Tino's abuse, an educational system not stacked in his favor, and a healthcare policy not working in Bernadette's best interests.
David Lee White
Nikkole Salter