2006 Inaugural Start the Story Commission Awarded to South Asian American Playwright Mrinalini Kamath

New York City-based independent company Fluid Motion Theater & Film launched its START THE STORY playwright commissioning program by awarding the 2006 inaugural commission to South Asian American playwright Mrinalini Kamath.  

Ms. Kamath has been commissioned by Fluid Motion to write a play adapted from the story, originating in Greek mythology, of two Argonauts from divergent backgrounds who came to share a common experience in the Quest for the Golden Fleece.  As part of Fluid Motion’s mission to highlight the commonality of human experience shared by disparate cultures through multicultural adaptations of classic texts, this play will focus on the theme of two characters who, despite diverse pasts, find mutual understanding in an unusual circumstance.

2006 marks the inaugural year for Fluid Motion’s START THE STORY program, a commissioning program in which a sponsor is the genesis of a new play, interacting with the writer and other artists and participating in the artistic development of the work.  

The inaugural 2006 START THE STORY commission was generously funded by The Nancy Quinn Fund (a program of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York) and Ms. Maria-Teresa A. Gamboni, currently Board Treasurer of Fluid Motion Theater & Film.  As part of the START THE STORY program, Fluid Motion will award Ms. Kamath a commissioning fee and will produce an initial staged reading of the play resulting from the commission.

Mrinalini Kamath received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School of the New School University.  Her plays Roulette, Confessions from the Afterlife, Views, The Some of All Parts and many others have been performed around the country, as well as the United Kingdom and Australia. She recently won first place in the 2005 East West Players (Los Angeles, CA) "Got Laughs?" Asian-American Comedy Play Contest, with her play Celestial Motions, was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2003 Sewanee Writers' Conference in Sewanee, TN, and a finalist for the 2004 Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, MN.  She has attended the New Play Development Workshop of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education three times as a playwright, and her short plays have been published in the Smith and Kraus <http://www.smithandkraus.com/> anthologies, Best Stage Scenes of 1999, Best Stage Scenes of 2000 and Plays for 3 or More Actors. She has also been published by playscripts.com .  She is an alumnus of Youngblood, the emerging playwrights' collective at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, as well as a member of the South Asian League of Artists in AMerica (SALAAM), the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers' Lab and the Dramatists Guild.

The Nancy Quinn Fund was created in 1993 to assist A.R.T./New York member theatres with annual cash budgets under $100,000 through management seminars, annual competitive grants, and other services designed to help small companies facing the challenges of producing in New York City.

Maria-Teresa A. Gamboni has a graduate degree in political science from St. John's University in New York and has held positions in fields as diverse as advertising and import & export.  She is currently working in the corporate arena at a major insurance brokerage firm.  A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts Evening Division in 2002, Ms. Gamboni has returned subsequently to act in several productions, most recently appearing in the role of Juanita in Ed Graczyk's "Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean".  She has experience in student films and staged readings, with the emphasis on the development of new works.  Having honed her backstage skills working as a stage manager, Ms. Gamboni now looks forward to producing, writing and directing as well.  She is currently Board Treasurer of Fluid Motion Theater & Film.

Fluid Motion Theater & Film commissions, develops, and produces multi-ethnic adaptations of classic global texts to explore the commonality of the human experience shared by disparate cultures. Fluid Motion’s primary focus is the universality of a story – how the primary themes (love, hope, death, regret, etc.) of a classic work remain the same despite diverse casting and/or context. The company’s secondary focus is to give a voice to a new generation of theater audiences and artists: global transplants and multi-generational hyphenated racially diverse Americans who are a combination of universal and specific.  Since the company’s founding in 2002, programming has included the development and production of new film and theater projects adapted from classic western and non-western texts. Fluid Motion looks to provide a safe and nurturing environment for writers to develop new work alongside directors and actors, and specifically aims to serve emerging artists of color and female artists – demographics that are traditionally underrepresented in the artistic community.