Dramatist and Geneseo English alum Molly Smith Metzler, who launched her playwriting career in Geneseo’s Black Box Theater, has had a play selected for main stage production in the 2011 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. Metzler’s Elemeno Pea was one of six plays selected from over 1,000 entries for the country’s largest and most prestigious competition for new plays and emerging playwrights. The play will open March 8, 2011 at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Marc Masterson, Artistic Director of the Humana Festival, said that Metzler’s play has “the potential … to be a break-out production both for Metzler and for the festival. It’s funny, it’s socially aware and the character work is extraordinarily confident and full. … You would not think this was written by an early-career playwright. It’s so confident and self-assured and fully-rendered.”
Since graduating from Geneseo, Metzler has fashioned an impressive career. In 2003, a revision of her original Geneseo play, Training Wisteria, won the Kennedy Center’s Best New Play Award in the National Student Playwriting Contest, the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award. Her play Carve was produced in London’s Tristan Bates Theatre. Close Up Space was produced this past summer at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, the artistic “birthplace” of Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s early major works as well as premieres of major plays by Wendy Wasserstein and John Guare, among others.