ATLANTA: Theatrical Outfit (TO) has announced that it will once again partner with Working Title Playwrights (WTP) for the Graham Martin Unexpected Play Festival. This four-part digital reading series of new plays from Atlanta playwrights will be presented over the four Thursdays in January. This year’s festival is named in honor of longtime TO trustee and advocate Graham Martin, who died in October 2020. Martin served as TO’s board chair for five years. Gift given in his memory provided the funding for this year’s festival.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with WTP on another new play festival,” said TO artistic director Matt Torney in a statement. “Atlanta is such a hotbed of talent and creativity, and one of the great joys of my first season at Theatrical Outfit has been getting to know the remarkable writers who call Atlanta home. We want to offer a home for these playwrights, where they can develop their work with amazing artists and a supportive audience, and to showcase the extraordinary talent our great city has to offer.”
The festival will open with Well-Intentioned White People (Jan. 7), by Imani Vaughn-Jones, about a Black aspiring writer and a white aspiring actor who are navigating daily micro-violence and the entertainment industry while they also try to keep their marriage intact. Ibi Owolabi will direct.
Next will be Memorial Day (Jan. 14), by Paul Donnelly, which follows a group of gay friends in 1992 who gather to celebrate life and escape the AIDS crisis, a difficult task for a doctor in the group who is working on the front lines. David Crowe will direct.
Following will be Raising the Dead (Jan. 21), by Erin K. Considine, about two lifelong friends and neighbors whose friendship is put to the test when one decides to leave. Lauren Morris will direct.
The festival will close with Sonhara Eastman’s Pearl (Jan. 28), about a biracial woman forced to interact with the father she’s never met in order to save her mother’s land. Jamil Jude will direct.
Theatrical Outfit has also announced the addition of playwright, dramaturg, director, and cultural worker Addae Moon as the organization’s new associate artistic director. Moon, who joined the staff on Jan. 1, was selected from a pool of over 100 candidates following a national search. Moon’s duties will include using the festival as a launchpad to take the lead on TO’s new work program Made in Atlanta. He will also oversee the new TO apprentice company, officially called the Tom Key Arts Leadership Program, as well as the expansion of community engagement programs.
“As both a playwright and a new play development dramaturg, the cultivation of new work and unique and diverse voices has been central to my artistic practice for 18 years,” said Moon in a statement. “That, coupled with Theatrical Outfit’s commitment to developing international and long term community partnerships, are the elements that attracted me to this position. I’m excited to play a role in helping Theatrical Outfit become an incubator for new work in the Southeast.”
Addae Moon is an Atlanta-based playwright, dramaturg, director, and cultural worker. He is the director of performance-based interpretation at the Atlanta History Center, an artistic associate with Found Stages Theatre, and a co-founder of the performance collective Hush Harbor Lab. Moon has served as a resident dramaturg with Working Title Playwright’s Ethel Woolson Lab. He was the recipient of the 2015 International Ibsen Award for his dramaturgical work on the project Master Comic and the 2014 John Lipsky Award from the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL) for his immersive play Four Days of Fury: Atlanta 1906. Moon was also a member of Alliance Theatre’s 2015-2016 Reiser Artists’ Lab as co-writer on the immersive project Third Council of Lyons with Found Stages. His recent immersive collaborations include Frankenstein’s Ball (2019/2020) and Frankenstein’s Funeral (2019) both with Found Stages. As the former literary manager at Horizon Theatre Company, he served as dramaturg on the early development projects for Marcus Gardley, Lauren Gunderson, Tanya Barfield, and Janece Shaffer. Moon received his BA in theatre arts from Clark Atlanta University and an MFA in playwriting from the Professional Playwright’s Program at Ohio University. He is also a member of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (LMDA) and the Fence Network.
