ACT Announces 2010 New Play Award: Extraordinary Chambers by David Wiener

Two Staged Readings, Feb 27-28

2010 ACT New Play Award Workshop
Extraordinary Chambers by David Wiener
Directed by Kurt Beattie
ACT’s Bullitt Cabaret

February 27, 2010 at 7:30 p.m.
February 28, 2010 at 3:00 p.m.

Post-play discussions follow both readings

Tickets
FREE! Reservations encouraged (but not required)
Seating is first come, first served

ACT Theatre
Ticket Office: (206) 292-7676
700 Union Street, Seattle WA 98101
www.acttheatre.org

Seattle, WA – February 9, 2010 – Playwright David Wiener has been named ACT’s 2010 New Play Award winner for his play Extraordinary Chambers. Two FREE staged readings will be presented in ACT’s Bullitt Cabaret on February 27 at 7:30 p.m. and February 28 at 3:00 p.m. Each reading will be followed immediately by post-play discussions with the playwright and the director, Kurt Beattie.
Set in Cambodia following one of the worst cases of genocide in the history of the world, Extraordinary Chambers brings Carter Dean, an American businessman, to Phnom Penh with his wife Mara reluctantly in tow. Primed to participate in the rehabilitation of a ravaged country’s economic infrastructure and woefully ignorant of the political and emotional terrain they are entering, the Dean’s stumble into a minefield of deception, intrigue, and betrayal connected to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. A thrilling, haunting play about ethics of survival and the indomitability of the human spirit, Extraordinary Chambers marks the debut of a new and innovative theatrical voice.
Now in its fifth year, the ACT New Play Award is sponsored by Gian-Carlo and Eulalie Scandiuzzi. Their generous support provides for a national call for submissions and a highly-competitive review process. The winner receives $2,500 and the opportunity to workshop their play at ACT.
“Extraordinary Chambers was selected by unanimous decision of the 2010 New Play Award selection committee,” said Literary Manager Anita Montgomery. “Beautifully written and compelling on a human and a global scale, the play takes us on a thrilling, haunting ride into the unfamiliar terrain of a war-ravaged Cambodia and asks us to look at the emotional and scarily-intimate terrain of human survival.”
Past ACT New Play Award recipients include Zakiyyah Alexander’s Sweet Maladies in 2009, presented by The Hansberry Project; Yussef El Guindi’s Language Rooms in 2008, which has plans for an East Coast world premiere this year at the Wilma Theater and has been also been featured in the Ojai Playwrights Conference, and selected for inclusion in the Playwright Foundation’s In The Rough new play development series; The K of D in 2006 by Laura Schellhardt which moved on to the Woolly Mammoth, Balagan, and Magic Theatres; and Mitzi’s Abortion in 2005 by Elizabeth Heffron which was later produced as part of ACT’s own 2006 Mainstage season.
The Extraordinary Chambers workshop will be directed by Kurt Beattie and will feature Jose Abaoag, Francois Chau, Khanh Doan, Tracy Hyland, and Darragh Kennan.