East West Players announces the winners of the Got Laughs? Comedy Playwriting Competiton
East West Players, the nation's premier Asian American theatre, announces the winners of the Got Laughs? Comedy Playwriting Competition. First place winner Celestial Motions by Mrinalini Kamath will have a staged reading as part of the East West Players Writers Gallery on Thursday, June 16 at 7:30 pm at the Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. First St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. The event is free and open to the public.
"This is an important competition for the Asian American artistic community because training writers, developing their plays, and presenting the works on stage advances our artistic mission as well as better represents our diversifying audience. This competition allows us to guide a piece from start to finish so we can create thought-provoking and humorous work that successfully meets the needs of the Asian Pacific American community," said East West Players Producing Artistic Director Tim Dang.
The competition's first place winner is Celestial Motions by Mrinalini Kamath, a recent M.F.A. graduate in playwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School. An Indian American writer from Princeton, New Jersey, her plays have been performed around the country as well as the United Kingdom and Australia, and have been published in the Smith and Kraus anthologies: Best Stage Scenes of 1999, Best Stage Scenes of 2000 and Plays for 3 or More Actors. Celestial Motions, an intercultural romantic comedy, tells the story of 25-year-old Leela who must have her Hindu astrological chart redrawn. The result is a startling prediction that sets the young woman on a journey of arranged dating and cyber romance as her parents desperately try to preserve their family's identity.
"I'm thrilled to have won and am very grateful to East West Players for giving me the opportunity for a reading and possible production in Los Angeles," said Kamath, who will receive $4,000 for her winning entry.
The second place winner, who will receive $3,000, is Driving in L.A.. by Henrietta Chico Nofre. A Los Angeles native, she is an alumnus of the East West Players‚ David Henry Hwang Writers Institute whose short stories were recently included in the anthology Going Home to a Landscape: Writing by Filipinas. Driving in L.A. focuses on Gracie, a 23-year old who lives with her mother and never learned to drive, and Carlo, a five-foot-three certified driving instructor who loves wearing tight leather pants.
The third place winner is Happy Moon Day, Holly Woo by Jiehae Park, who will receive $2,000. A Korean American writer from New York, her short play The Emerald City, was workshopped at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O‚Neill Center. Happy Moon Day, Holly Woo centers around the Jonathan Kim family whose wife abandoned them. To keep up his children's spirits, Jonathan desperately channels Donna Reed and declares every day a new holiday. The local high school, which Junior (accidentally) torched last spring, has recently been acquired by corporate soft-drink giant Cream Cola and is undergoing some major changes of its own. Daughter Darlene has the simple solution to all their problems: adopt a homeless senior citizen to be their "New Grandma." Things can't possibly get any worse--until Mom comes home.
Honorable mention goes to Michael Golamco's Cowboy vs. Samurai, a comic re-telling of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Golamco is of Chinese and Fillipino ethnicity originally from the Bay Area. Now a Los Angeles-based writer, his plays have been performed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and the 45 Bleecker Theater in New York City, The Smithsonian Institution, Dartmouth College, Stanford University, UCLA and U.C. Berkeley. In Cowboy vs. Samurai, Travis Park is a high school teacher and the only Korean American man living in a dusty cowboy town known as Breakneck, Wyoming. When a gorgeous, whip-smart Asian American woman arrives, he immediately falls for her. The only problem is that she only dates white men.
The competition had more than 50 full-length plays, musicals or solo pieces with predominantly Asian Pacific casts and/or themes submitted from all over the country. Over a 7-month period, each submission was read by at least three members from the panel of judges which included actress/playwright Amy Hill, director Henry Chan, playwright Alice Tuan, director Judith Nihei, and director Gary Shimokawa.
The Got Laughs? Comedy Playwriting Competition was made possible by the generous support of the James Irvine Foundation with additional support from ABC Entertainment Television Group.
For more information about the Got Laughs? Comedy Playwriting Competition and all of East West Players Literary Programs contact Literary Manager Judy Soo Hoo at (213) 625-7000 x27 or jsoohoo@eastwestplayers.org.
