Kevin Confoy, (Program Director), has directed the first productions of eight published plays, including new works by Warren Leight, Kenneth Lonergan, and Edward Allan Baker. He has directed three new plays by Joyce Carol Oates. Producer credits include the first productions of plays by Marsha Norman, Regina Taylor, Steve Martin, Christopher Durang, John Guare, and Arthur Miller, among others. He has received the OBIE Award, Outstanding Achievement Off-Broadway award, 2006 Drama Desk Nomination, and Best Revival of a Play award.

Edward Allan Baker is a frequently produced and published playwright with 20 plays to his credit; his work has been performed in Vienna, London, and Australia. His play Dolores is included in the volume Best Short Plays 88-89 and was made into a film shown at Sundance and other national film festivals. He has written for HBO and Showtime and has taught playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College for eight years.

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of The Pumpkin Pie Show, a rigorous storytelling performance backed by its own live soundtrack. The Pumpkin Pie Show has been performed at theatres across the country and at several international theatre festivals. Clay is the author of rest area, a collection of short stories, and miss corpus, a novel. Both are published by Hyperion. Clay is a 2000 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and is a frequent guest teacher here and at other schools.

Christine Farrell, a member of the College’s theatre faculty since 1991, has performed in regional theatres across the country. Her New York credits include Catholic School Girls, The Primary English Class, Broken Glass, and Uncle Vanya. For the past 10 seasons, she has had a recurring role on TV’s Law & Order as Arlene Shrier, the ballistics detective. Currently head of the Acting Program at NYU’s Playwrights Horizons Studio, Christine has published two plays — MaMa Drama and The Once Attractive Woman — and appeared in several soap operas and films, including The Ice Storm and Fatal Attraction.

Doug MacHugh is recipient of two LA Dramalogue acting awards. His film acting credits include Clean and Sober, Alien Nation, Come See the Paradise, and Weird Science. He has also appeared on several TV programs, including Guiding Light, Law & Order, Cheers, Quantum Leap, and LA Law. Doug has written PSAs, industrials, documentaries, and 60 hours of local and regional live television in Los Angeles.

Shirley Kaplan is a playwright, director, and designer. She is co-founder of the OBIE Award-winning Paper Bag Players and founder of Painter’s Theatre. Her productions of new plays include works at E.S.T., Playwrights Horizons, UBU Repertory, LaMaMa, The Zipper, NY Performance Works, and Image Theatre. Her plays include The Connecticut Cowboy, nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The Dream Box, Neon, Floating Cathedral, and many others. Shirley is a member of The Dramatist Guild and E.S.T.

Guest Faculty Throughout the week, we will offer a series of scheduled and informal discussions on subjects of particular interest. On occasion, we will be joined by special guests for these conversations about the playwright-director relationship, casting protocol for playwrights, and ‘the business of the business,’ among other topics.