2011 Schedule:

Oct. 6, 2011 7:00pm- The Charity Fish Fry Tinikling Show by K. Biadaszkiewicz

Oct. 7, 2011-7:00pm- What Ever Happened to Baby by Merri Biechler

Oct. 7, 2011- 11:00pm- The Ohio University School of theater presents Midnight Madness

Oct. 8, 2011- 7:00pm- An Unlikely Hero by Lawrence DuKore

Oct. 9, 2011- 2:00pm- Death Squad by W.R. Smiddie will be presented as a workshop production

Who's Who and What's What:

Raymond Hardie is currently developing STOKER, originally a play, into a hybrid musical with composer/lyricist Joe Jackson. It was most recently presented in workshop at The Director's Company in New York City in May 2010. Hardie's play BLUE HEAVEN was presented in workshop at The Director's Company in New York in 2003 with Colm Meaney and Laila Robbins. THE COUNTESS AND CHICAGO MAY was presented at the Ashland New Play Festival October 13th - October 20th, 2002.  His play STOKER was first presented in equity workshop at The Director's Company in New York City in August, 2001.

Hardie was an actor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, for six years, during which time he played over thirty roles ranging from the Duke in MEASURE FOR MEASURE to Lenin in Tom Stoppard's TRAVESTIES.

He received his training at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School and then spent a year with the Liverpool Playhouse before going to Dublin.  In New York, he played Cliff opposite Malcolm McDowell in LOOK BACK IN ANGER at the Roundabout Theater. This was subsequently taped for Showtime. He has also acted at the Huntington Theater in Boston and the Olney in Maryland among others.

While at the Abbey Theatre, he wrote WHO FLIES THE NETS for the Document Theatre Company.  The play had a successful run on the London fringe after it toured England.  The Abbey Theatre later commissioned him to write a play about Oliver Goldsmith, BUT FEW SOLDIERS, which they performed at the international Goldsmith festival.  He was also commissioned by BBC Televison to write two teleplays, A Soldier's Song and Rub A Dub Dub.

His first novel Abyssos was published by Tor Books in New York, and for a number of years he travelled back and forth to London writing television scripts and a television series for BBC television as well as working on two film scripts for Mark Forstater Productions. He also wrote scripts for the ABC television soap opera Ryan's Hope. His second novel Fleet was published in both hardback and paperback by Hodder and Stoughton in England.

He is currently a director of communications for the University of California, San Diego.

William Robert Smiddie (Death Squad) (1931-2011) born during the Great Depression in a Harlan County Kentucky where his mom would drag him out of school when the shooting wars started.  She wanted her kids around her in any storm.  From Kentucky they moved to middle Tennessee where his father, a union man, would not take work because there were no unions.  This sort of thing has influenced him greatly. After five years of high school at McMinnville, Tennessee he graduated only because of basketball.  He played guard and never cared who won as long as the game was aggressive and close.  (This is important later.)

From his first job at a DuPont plant he was drafted during the Korean War, while all his buddies could avoid the draft as their rich fathers sent them off to college.  A fact of the draft he has never forgotten.  Why him?  Why Korean?  And why not them?

Back in the states, a veteran on the G.I. bill he went to college at middle Tennessee State University. He attended Graduate school at Iowa State where he is still one course short of the much sought after M.F.A.

While working in the welfare department in Nashville he had theprivilege of participating in the Civil Rights struggle by preparing used cars with Tennessee tags for dumb white kids from the North to use to enter the deep South.  And while there had a play produced in NYC, which allowed him to meet Tom Hayden in New Jersey.  It now seemed to him that he could control his own life, which had finally begun.  After which, turning down a organizing job with the Highlander Folk School he moved with wife and kids to Cleveland, Ohio to work with S.D.S. in the inner city.  Welfare Rights, Free Clinics, and helping to organize the 1968 police riot in Chicago. From there to the street demonstrations against the only war America has ever lost.

He settled in in Southern Ohio where he made pottery, wrote unfinished plays, and dreamt of Alaska.  

THE CHARITY FISH FRY TINIKLING SHOW
Writer's Statement
THE CHARITY FISH FRY TINIKLING SHOW is about a young woman who has never heard her father say he is proud of her. She works very hard to assemble and put on a one-of-a-kind show and lets him know, so he can attend. After all her efforts, she fails in her goal. But she finds something better. My artistic take on this piece is that it is an innovative and entertaining physical theatre piece ideal for energetic actors and a director with a playful imagination and comedic sensibility. THE CHARITY FISH FRY TINIKLING SHOW has been described by its original director as commedia dell'arte, but I wrote it to represent a part of my own experience that I treasure.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY ABBY?
Writer's Statement
This play is about a young woman trying to define her life as meaningful and her job choice as successful.  "We all remember where we were on that snowy March morning in 1972 when, after 41 hours of national news coverage, we watched as Baby Abby was pulled out alive from that Wisconsin ice cave.  As the twenty-five year anniversary of the rescue approaches, Abigail Walters discovers that she's Baby Abby and to her horror realizes that she's done nothing with her life to justify her being saved." As our society continues to define happiness as the number of cars in our garage and the amount of money in the bank, how does someone with an ordinary life compete with the media?  How do we define our internal worth?  I want to ask my audience:  can a small life be a life well lived?  Can everyday choices give meaning to our lives?  Would we be happier if we stepped away from what the media defines as important to find that importance for ourselves within our own communities?

AN UNLIKELY HERO
Writer's Statement
This play is a tribute to Ulysses Grant, not as a historic or heroic figure, but as a human being, with all his doubts about himself, his guilt about the deaths of Union and Confdederate troops (and yet the necessity for his military strategy), about His failings as a provider for his family, his limitations as a president, as a general and his lack of business acumen, which caused great hardship to his family.. Mostly, my play is about a person with whom an audience can identify.

DEATH SQUAD The play examines the events that led to a terrible massacre in El Salvador in 1981, aided and abetted by the American government. It does so by the device of five people in 2011 who come together to create and rehearse a play that addresses these matters. It alternates in tone from comic to grimly serious.

The 2011 Humble Play Festival is sponsored and supported by the ABC Players, Decorative Injections, The Athens County Convention and Visitors Bureau and The Corporation for the Performing Arts, Athens Holiday Inn Express and several anonymous donors. 

The Mission of the Humble Play is to promote the art of playwriting while introducing the process of play development to an audience. This is achieved by inviting playwrights to submit their new plays to a committee of judges. These judges chose plays to be produced as staged readings by theater companies for the general public as a once a year,  festival.

Each selected play will be presented as a reading.  A reading is defined as actors presenting the words of a script, using scripts-in-hand. Each reading will be kept extremely simple so that the playwright's words may be the focus of the event.  All readings will be followed by a moderated talk back session where audience members are invited to give their feed-back on the plays.
 
All events are free and open to the public.  Donations are encouraged.
The mission of ARTS/West is to make facilities, resources, and opportunities available to arts organizations, individual artists, and community residents. ARTS/West harnesses community focus for all individuals engaged in the creation, performance and exhibition of the arts and promotes activities preserving the beauty, heritage and culture of our town.

The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this organization with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.