Salt Lake Acting Company - New Play Sounding Series

New Play Sounding Series
Free Reading

Monday, May 1 @ 7pm

Director: Robin Wilks-Dunn

Actors: Colleen Baum, Jacob Russell Johnson, Darby Mest, Nicki Nixon, Richard Scott, Matthew Sincell

Stage Manager/Reader: William Richardson

Winter is coming and the squirrels of the great tree are feeling the pinch. The greatest squirrel in the greatest tree in the greatest forest in all the land will not share his nuts. What's worse, rival squirrel families and rival squirrel species are all begging, pleading, and tricking to try to get his nuts. Will the tree survive? Will his family? Will war come and bring the whole thing tumbling down? The answer is yes, but we might have some fun getting there.

SLAC thanks the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation for their generous support of this vital program.

New Play Sounding Series Free Reading
Monday, November 21 @ 7pm

Director: Shannon Musgrave
Cast: Anne Louise Brings, Eric Cadora, Dee-Dee Darby Duffin, Jacob Russell Johnson, Melanie Nelson, Topher Rasmussen

It’s company outing day, and Laura, one of the top travel agents of her generation, is having the best / worst day of her life. So much so that she decides to end it all. Afterwards, her colleagues try to piece things together on a memorial blog, but how do you mourn someone you didn’t know that well?

A comedy about depression, or: a treatise on travel agents who don’t travel.

Workshopped in the 2016 SLAC Playwrights' Lab, LAURA AND THE SEA has gone on to be developed in the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, was a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, the Princess Grace Award, and was a semi-finalist for the Relentless Award.

SLAC thanks the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation for their generous support of this vital program.

New Play Sounding Series Free Reading
Monday, April 25 @ 7pm

Director: Dave Mortensen
Featuring: Brighton Hertford, Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin, Elise Groves, Jenessa Bowen, Stephen Drabicki, Tito Livas, Aaron Adams
Reader: Joy Haynes

This pitch black comedy has an illicit affair, a couple hanging on by a thread, bears at the window, and an adorable missing dog named Mr Bundles. No one's happy, people stop being nice, and blood spills in a story that mashes up violent myth and ideas about "good neighbors" to explore what happens when the mercury rises.

SLAC thanks the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation for their generous support of this vital program.

New Play Sounding Series Free Reading
Monday, February 1 @ 7pm

Director: Tracy Callahan
Featuring: Daniel Beecher, Anne Louise Brings, Anne Cullimore Decker, Cragun Foulger, Bob Nelson
Stage Manager/Reader: Sarah Danielle Young

WINTER is the story of an older couple who has an end-of-life pact, until one of them backs out. This new play from Julie Jensen, inspired by the story "Robeck" by Margaret Pabst Battin, is a beautiful tale of family and the right to die.

SLAC thanks the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation for their generous support of this vital program.

New Play Sounding Series Free Reading
Monday, November 9 @ 7pm

Director: Nancy Borgenicht
Featuring: Meg Gibson, Tamara Howell, Valerie Kittel, Susan Levin, and Shannon Musgrave
Dramaturg: Kathleen Cahill
Stage Manager: Justin Ivie

In this intimate sequence of poems, which tell the story of Sharon Olds' divorce, the author opens her heart, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; and the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. Adapted for a theatrical reading by Nancy Borgenicht, STAG'S LEAP is both an elegantly personal story of divorce and a universal journey through love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

SLAC thanks the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation for their generous support of this vital program.

*First published in Stag's Leap (Alfred A Knopf) copyright Sharon Olds 2012

New Play Sounding Series Free Reading
Monday, September 21, 2015 @ 7pm

Director: Shannon Musgrave
Cast: Olivia Custodio, Danny Egan, Brighton Hertford, Patrick Kintz, William Richardson
Stage Manager/Reader: Sarah Danielle Young

Sloane isn't sure why exactly her husband Timothy brought home a probably dangerous drifter. It's something about "doing a good deed." Of course, it's hard to think straight when her kleptomaniac neighbor keeps dropping by to chat and steal. And then things get violent. BLEEDING HEARTS is a dark farce about the disappearing middle class and the way people can slowly forget how to put themselves in each others' shoes.