The Plays and Playwrights Publicity Blitz Begins

As many of you know, NYTE - also known as The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. - publishes an annual anthology of new works by emerging playwrights every winter entitled Plays and Playwrights. This volume is the brainchild of Martin Denton, founder, editor, and chief reviewer for nytheatre.com. He began the series back in 2000, with the now out-of-print Plays and Playwrights for the New Millenium (which featured Kirk Wood Bromley’s Midnight Brainwash Revival, C.J. Hopkins’ Horse Country, and Cafe Society by Robert Simonson, to name a few), and has published a new one every year since.

For several of those years I have helped Martin publicize both the books and the growing stable of Plays and Playwrights authors by interviewing each new batch every winter when the new book comes out. In keeping with that tradition, the first round of author interviews for the soon-to-be-published Plays and Playwrights 2008 are now online and available for your reading pleasure. Crystal Skillman (The Telling Trilogy), Daniel Talbott (What Happened When), John Regis (Linnea), Leslie Bramm (Marvelous Shrine), and Elena Hartwell (In Our Name) all weigh in with their thoughts about each of their respective works and a whole bunch of other topics: site specific theater, teaching New York City schoolchildren about Shakespeare, driving the zamboni at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, the advantages of being married to another writer, the writerly influence of both Aristotle and The Beatles, the continued necessity for activism in theater - it’s all here. Good stuff. Check it out.