Season Five
"I am so thrilled to have this astonishing collection of new plays by women in our fifth season. All of these stories of personal revolution are pulse-pounding, brutally honest and unbelievably funny. They are a testament to how we find humor, hope, and rebirth even in our darkest moments."
-Artistic Director, Hutch Pimentel
EMILY ZEMBA is a New York based playwright and performer. Her plays include Have You Been There?, I’m Sorry I Brought up God, and Deer and the Lovers. Her plays Look up, Speak Nicely, & Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers all the Time, and We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun (co-writer) received productions at The Yale Cabaret in its 46th and 47th seasons. Also at the Yale Cabaret, she produced and co-hosted the Third Annual Yale School of Drag (2015). Emily’s work has been developed with LAByrinth Theater Company (One-Act Experiment , 2014), the Theater Masters National MFA Playwright’s Festival (2014), Great Plains Theater Conference PlayLabs (2015) and The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis (Core Apprenticeship 2015). She is a proud member of The Middle Voice, and co-founder of The Party Line - a Brooklyn based theater company. Emily has taught Playwriting at Wesleyan University. MFA, Yale School of Drama.
Deer and the lovers
by emily zemba, directed by Jesse Roth
November 5 - December 4, 2016
Qiana and Peter take a romantic weekend getaway to New Hampshire only to find that a deer has crashed through the window and died. Things really go off the rails when Peter’s brash sister, Marnie, and her daft husband, Felix, show up unannounced. The dead deer, a mysterious animal control officer, and nightfall in the forest expose the harsh truths of each lover's life.
DEER AND THE LOVERS is a bold new farce about being lost in love, lost in the woods, and forging a new path when life veers off track.
JIEHAE PARK's peerless received its world premiere at Yale Rep after being developed as part of the 2015 Cherry Lane Mentor Project; upcoming productions include Barrington Stage and Marin Theatre Company. She is also one of the writers of Wondrous Strange (2016 ATL/Humana Festival). Her work has been developed through the Soho Rep W/D Lab, Playwrights Horizons, Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, the Emerging Writers Group at the Public, Sundance, NYTW, Dramatists Guild Fellowship, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Playwrights Realm, and the amazing Ma-Yi Writers Lab.
Jiehae is the 2016 recipient of the Weissberger Award at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her plays have won the Leah Ryan Prize and Princess Grace Award (Hannah and the Dread Gazebo), and were included in two years of the Kilroys List. Hannah and the Dread Gazebo will receive its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in March 2017.
Commissions: Playwrights Horizons, McCarter Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Geffen Playhouse. Residencies: MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Hermitage, and McCarter/Sallie B. Goodman. She will be a 2016-17 Hodder fellow at Princeton.
As a performer: Clubbed Thumb, La Jolla Playhouse, Studio Theatre, Tiny Little Band, REDCAT, and Sleep with Ripe Time/The Play Co. BA, Amherst; MFA, UCSD.
peerless
by jiehae park, directed by hutch pimentel
February 11 - March 12, 2017
In an ordinary Midwestern high school, twin sisters M and L are competitive with everyone—except each other. When the failsafe combination of perfect academics, killer extracurriculars, and calculated self-identification fails to impress The College’s early decision admissions board, they hatch a sinister Plan B to secure their future.
PEERLESS is a blisteringly funny new riff on Shakespeare’s Macbeth about the unbreakable bond between sisters whose vaulting ambition will not be deferred at any cost.
Bess Wohl’s plays include SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS, AMERICAN HERO, BARCELONA and TOUCHED. They have been produced or developed at theaters in New York and around the country, including Second Stage, Ars Nova, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, People’s Light and Theatre Company, Center Theatre Group, The Contemporary American Theater Festival, Vineyard Arts Project, The Pioneer Theatre, The Pittsburgh Public Theater, The Northlight Theater, TheaterWorks New Works Fesitval, The Geffen Playhouse, The Vineyard Arts Project, Ojai Playwright's Conference, the Cape Cod Theatre Project and the New York International Fringe Festival (award for Best Overall Production).
She also writes for film and television. She is currently in post-production on Broad Squad, an original pilot for ABC. She is also at work on a new feature for Disney, and has written two features for Paramount Pictures: THE LUXE (based on the book) and VIRGINIA (the true story of mob queen Virginia Hill). Her screenplay adaptation of her play, IN, was included on Hollywood's Black List of best scripts. She has also developed original television pilots for HBO, USA, FOX and the CW.
Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, PlayPenn, the Sewanee Writer's Conference and Ars Nova. She has been the recipient of new play commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Hartford Stage and Center Theatre Group.
In her previous life as an actress, Bess appeared onstage in New York and regionally, and in numerous films and TV shows where she has given birth, solved crimes, committed crimes, been wrongly accused, and come back from the dead.
She is a graduate of Harvard, Magna Cum Laude, where she studied with Seamus Heaney and Jamaica Kincaid and was awarded the Rona Jaffe Writing Prize and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship. She earned her MFA from the Yale School of Drama, where she was a recipient of the Rebecca West Scholarship.
She is originally from Brooklyn, New York, and divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.
American hero
by Bess wohl, directed by cody estle
May 5 - June 4, 2017
At a toasted subs franchise in the local mall, three up-and-coming “sandwich artists”—a teenager, a single mom, and a downsized refugee from corporate banking—are perfecting the mustard-to-cheese ratio according to the company manual. But when their shot at the American dream is interrupted by a series of strange events, they become unlikely allies in a post-recession world.
AMERICAN HERO is a supersized dark comedy about life, liberty and the pursuit of sandwiches.
but wait, there's more...
We're packing our bags but we're not going far!
FFT is moving down the street to The Den where we're thrilled to be a new resident company.
We think you'll love our new digs as much as we do.
Our first show in our new home will be DEER AND THE LOVERS.