Double Trouble
by Gavin Witt, Director of Dramaturgy/Associate Director
For the first time in the history of Play Lab at Baltimore Center Stage, this fall will bring a double bill of two plays and two playwrights to our signature developmental workshop and reading series. And to bust our dramaturgical buttons with pride, both are what you’d call homegrown talents.
Miranda Rose Hall, (above left) whose one-act To the Flame will be one of the pair in development, grew up coming to plays at Baltimore Center Stage. A Baltimore native just back in town after a stint in New Haven to pick up an MFA at Yale, she previously spent the 2013/14 Season here as the Hot Desk Resident Playwright (where she wrote the first draft of this piece).
Of her return, she shared, “I am so excited to join Play Lab with To the Flame. I wrote this play when I was the Hot Desk Resident Playwright at BCS in 2013, and it is thrilling to come back to it now. This play came out of the relationships I built with survivors of domestic violence I met while working in a shelter in Missoula, Montana; writing the play was one way for me to dramatize questions of love, survival, and imagination that haunt me. I can't wait to dive back in!”
Rachael Knoblauch (above right) came to BCS while still a theater student at UMBC, and actually participated in the final readings of Miranda’s residency. The following year, she herself spent the season as Hot Desk Resident Playwright and a member of our inaugural Playwrights Collective—where she worked on a prior draft of Handle It, the other one-act in the Play Lab.
Revisiting the play, Rachael noted, "It can seem to a playwright as if a piece is never quite done, and this is especially true to me with Handle It. My relationship with this work and its characters has continually evolved, and I have had the delight to work closely with Baltimore Center Stage on the course of its cultivation. I am thrilled again to give it new life, to harness raw vigor and perspective, nurtured by the collaborative nexus that is the BCS Play Lab."
It’s a pleasure to welcome these two dynamic young writers back into the building that they’ve made an artistic home, and we hope you can join us for the next step of the journey!