The Zip Code Plays - Season Two Playwrights Panel
Zoom
This summer, we hosted a live panel discussion with the Antaeus Playwrights Lab Members behind the second season of The Zip Code Plays: Los Angeles:
- Sean Abley (90069: West Hollywood - Brunch, Interrupted)
- Mildred Inez Lewis (90026: Echo Park - $10 and a Tambourine)
- Paula Cizmar (90303: Inglewood - The Vig)
- Khari Wyatt (91331: Pacoima - Gold & Shine)
- Peppur Chambers (91601: North Hollywood - End of the Line)
- Elizabeth Wong (91754: Monterey Park - Bingo Bitches)
Alex Goldberg, one of our Season One playwrights, returned to lead an engaging discussion with the six Antaeus Playwrights Lab Members whose work is featured in Season Two.
Click here to watch a recording of the panel and learn more about the playwrights' creative process in developing these new works, and they drew inspiration from history and the local neighborhoods of LA.
Other
Sean Abley is a screenwriter, journalist, dramaturg, novelist, and award-winning playwright. His most recent work, Tea Party, was part of Antaeus Theatre Company’s LAB RESULTS reading series. His plays have been developed and performed at the Kennedy Center, Goodman Theatre, Celebration Theatre, Provincetown Theater, Fuse Theatre Ensemble, St. Louis Actors’ Studio, Write/Act Repertory, Factory Theater, Merry-Go-Round Youth Theatre, SkyPilot Theatre Company, and the Virginia City Players. Sean has an MFA in Playwriting from The Playwrights Lab at Hollins University, and is a member of the Antaeus Theatre Company’s Playwrights Lab, the Writers Guild of America, Playwrights Union (Los Angeles), and the Dramatists Guild.
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PEPPUR CHAMBERS is an international writer/producer/educator. A member of Circle X Emerging Playwrights Group, Moving Arts MADLab, and Antaeus Playwrights Lab, she uses her voice to amplify women’s issues, social justice and love. Next up: The Fire In-Between, a radio play about LA’s 1933 Griffith Park fire for Antaeus Theatre Company’s The Zip Code Plays Season Three. Her plays For the Love of You, House Rules, The Build UP, Dick & Jayne Get a Life and one-woman show, Harlem’s Awakening: Storytelling Live have been produced in LA and Prague. Learn more about The Hot One including her published fiction at penandpeppur.com
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PAULA CIZMAR is an award-winning playwright/librettist. Plays include: Antigone X (California Repertory) and The Last Nights of Scheherazade (winner of the Israel Baran Award). She is one of the writers of the site-specific Hotel Play (Playwrights Arena) and Seven (LA Theatre Works, plus 30+ productions in 22 languages). She wrote the libretto for Invisible (LA Opera Eurydice Found Festival), Firecrackers (commissioned by White Snake Opera), and won the Pittsburgh Festival Opera Fight for the Right competition for Night Flight of Minerva’s Owl. She was awarded a Mellon Foundation On the Road grant and a Rockefeller residency at Bellagio. paulacizmar.com
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MILDRED INEZ LEWIS (Writer): The Museum Annex (Central Works); The Last Ride (Company of Angels); CowGirls (EST-LA, Everyday Inferno, William Inge Playwriting Festival); Submerged (Actors Circle Ensemble, Goodly Frame). (Writer/Director) Can Also Play (Outfest Fusion, Outfest), left (Reel Rasquache, San Francisco African American Film Festival, Santa Barbara African American Film Festival). Training: HB Studios, B.A. from Oberlin College; M.F.A. & M.A. from UCLA. Member: Dramatists Guild, Company of Angels, Ensemble Studio Theatre - Los Angeles Playwrights Unit, Playground - LA. Awards: L.B. Williams Playwriting Contest, Humanitas’ PLAY LA, Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Award. Publications: Applause 10 Minute Plays 2020, Breathe Fire Literary Magazine. Extinction Rebellion.
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Elizabeth Wong’s plays include Tam Tran Goes To Washington, Kimchee & Chitlins, Letters to a Student Revolutionary, and China Doll. Her work has been produced at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Victory Gardens Theater, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, and East West Players. Honors include the Tanne Foundation Award for Artistic Achievement, and the Kennedy Center’s David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award. An alumna of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Ms. Wong was also a Disney Writing Fellow, Los Angeles Times Op-Ed columnist, and writer for the ABC sitcom All-American Girl starring Margaret Cho. She’s a member of PEN, Dramatist Guild, and Writers Guild West. Currently, she teaches at Boston Conservatory@Berklee.
elizabethwong.net
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Khari Wyatt is the descendant of runaway slaves and inner-city America with its adversities, tragedies and triumphs; the son of high school sweethearts: a mother who is an artist and a father who courageously moved his young family from the rust-belt to our Nation's Capital to find a better life; the grandson of men who wore blue collars in auto plants and on railroad trains; the grandson of women who taught Sunday school and waitressed in greasy spoons. He is a writer.
His work has placed in various competitions including, Disney/ABC Writers Fellowship, Sony Pictures Entertainment Diversity Writers Program, AMC One-Hour Drama competition, Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, and Writer’s-for-Writer’s Diversity Fellowship among others. Some of the fellowships and grants he has received came from the MacDowell Colony, the Guy Hanks/Marvin Miller Screenwriting Program, and the Panavision New Filmmaker Equipment Grant.
He was recently selected to write and develop his play, Starchild, in the Circle X Theatre Company Evolving Playwrights Group. He was one of eleven writers of #While We Breathe: A Night of Creative Protest, a streaming theatrical event produced by Brian Moreland and Arvind Ethan David. Moving Arts, Chalk Repertory Theatre as well as the DC Black Theatre Festival have hosted his plays for readings and workshops. His play Some Type of Ecstasy was a semifinalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. His ten-minute play, Ingredients, was presented as part of the Moving Arts- Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Night at the Museum. He currently is a writer for Moving Arts’ web series, Isolation Inn being aired on YouTube in fall 2020.
Wyatt is an alumnus of Howard University, earned an MFA in Film from Columbia University in the City of New York, and also completed the Summer Legal Institute at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He is member of Antaeus Theatre Company Playwrights Lab, Moving Arts and the Playwrights Union.
khariwyatt.com