Meet the Playwrights

ROBERT ATTENWEILER is a playwright, screenwriter and independent producer living in New York City.  His plays include …and we all wore leather pants (published in Plays and Playwrights 2008), Kansas City Or Along the Way (featured at the inaugural Access Theater Spotlight Series) and All Kinds of Shifty Villains (for which he received a FAR grant from The Field and a space grant from the Access Theater).  His new play Our Time Has Come was chosen to be developed as part of the Lark Play Development Center’s Playwright’s Playground in Spring 2011.  His web series, Apt1B (found on www.disgracedtv.com), recently completed its second season and was one of the first 20 series chosen to be featured at the 2011 Los Angeles Web Series Festival.  He is a 2008 nytheatre.com Person of the Year and a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting.  Robert founded his independent production company, Disgraced Productions (www.disgracedproductions.com), in 2005 and continues to produce material through DP, as well as through its more recent off-shoots, Disgraced Comics and DisgracedTV.

KRISTEN PALMER is member of the 2010-12 Women’s Project Theatre Lab and a 2010-11 Dramatists Guild Fellow.  She received the 2008-09 Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center.   Her plays include The Stray Dog, The Melting Point, Local Story, The Heart In Your Chest, Departures, and Gloucester Point.  They have been produced and/or developed with Rising Phoenix Rep, New Georges, Blue Coyote Theater Group, The Playwrights’ Center, P73, Soho Rep, Circle X, The Orlando Shakespeare Festival and others.  She is an associate artist of New Georges, a Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab Alumna, associate playwright of P73 Productions, and a former company member of Printer’s Devil Theatre in Seattle.  She is a graduate of Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire, England and NYU’s Gallatin School (MA) where she focused on Writing and Drama-In-Education.  Before any of this she grew up in Stafford County, VA.

CHRISTINE WHITLEY’s first play The Goatwoman of Corvis County received its world premiere in 2008 at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. as the inaugural production for the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre.  Goatwoman was also produced in 2010 by Pacific Resident Theatre in Los Angeles as a part of their Co-op season.  In 2008, her ten-minute play Peep Show was seen Off-Off Broadway in Blue Coyote Theater Group’s evening of short plays, collectively titled “Happy Endings”.  In the spring of 2010, her one-act play Parents & Children was produced Off-Off Broadway as a part of the Drilling Company Theatre’s short plays project “Faith”.  Her second full-length play Miles Away is the first winner of the Woodward/Newman Drama Award and was a semifinalist for the 2010 O’Neill Playwrights Conference.  A graduate of The University of Cincinnati – College Conservatory of Music, Christine is also a Designated Linklater Voice Teacher.  Member Dramatists Guild.

JOHN YEARLEY is the author of Leap (Mickey Kaplan New American Play Prize) and Ephemera (John Gassner Award). His new play, Another Girl, will be read by Naked Angels in March. His plays A Low-Lying Fog and All in Little Pieces are published by Samuel French. Author of the forthcoming book Daddy’s Not Tall Enough to Touch the Moon. Member of the Writer’s Guild, Dramatists Guild, and a MacDowell Fellow. Husband to Blair, father to Henry.

DAVID ZELLNIK is the author of the book and lyrics for the musical Yank! (off-Broadway 2010 @The York Theatre, music: Joseph Zellnik) for which he received 2 Drama Desk nominations, as well as nominations from the Outer Critics’ Circle, and Lucille Lortel Foundation, and which is slated to open on Broadway in the 2011/2012 season. Yank! also had an award winning run at the Gallery Players in Brooklyn 2007 (IT Award for Best Musical, GLAAD nomination for best Off-Off Broadway Musical) and a sold out run in San Diego's Diversionary Theatre 2008.

His previous musical, City of Dreams has been performed in Cardiff, Wales at the first Int’l Music Theatre Festival, as well as in New York at the Midtown International Theatre Festival. In addition, it won the Nat’l Music Theatre Network competition culminating in a reading at the Lamb’s Theatre; 2 songs from it appear on Alison Fraser’s album “Men In My Life.” David adapted the Arthur Giron play Flight for TheaterworksUSA, creating the musical First in Flight which toured the US in 2003/2004.
He is also currently adapting Peter Pan for Disney (with Eric Svejcar, music) to culminate in Peter Pan Jr – four productions are already planned around the country for the 2010/2011 season.

His plays include: Serendib (Off-Broadway Ensemble Studio Theatre, created with a grant from the Sloan Foundation) which will be performed at the Hippodrome Theatre in Florida in Feb 2011; Ariel Sharon Hovers Between Life and Death and Dreams of Theodor Herzl (Developed at Chautauqua, Epic Theatre Ensemble and Culture Project in NYC, and Theatre J in DC); Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom (OOBR Award winner for Best Play, seen in London and NYC); as well as the published one-acts Ideogram and Killing Hand both part of Ensemble Studio Theatre's Marathons.

He has been given grants from the Sloan Foundation, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation. He is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Dramatists Guild. www.davidzellnik.com