At the heart of the Bruntwood Prize is collaboration and partnership – to support playwrights, to encourage people to tell stories, to see work on our stages and beyond.  All our partners recognize the power of new work reaching far and wide and the importance of audiences engaging with that work.

From 2017 our livestream workshops were augmented by some brilliant international partners- who supported us via offering their own workshops to the growing livestream archive filmed in Manchester. 

Whether you are totally new to writing for the stage, or an established playwright we hope that the guidance of the brilliant writers who have contributed to the workshop series will support your own writing.

 These workshops have been produced by the partners- so there are some discrepancies in the quality of audio. 

 

 

Naomi Iizuka- Live from Berkley, USA 

Telling Ghost Stories

In this workshop we join the multi-award winning Naomi Iizuka with her playwriting class at the UC San Diego as she discusses the ghost and the ghost story on stage. (You can also spot International Commendation winner Dave Harris in this video! He is a student at UC San Diego)

Naomi Iizuka’s plays include 36 VIEWS, POLAROID STORIES, ANON(YMOUS), LANGUAGE OF ANGELS, ALOHA, SAY THE PRETTY GIRLS, TATTOO GIRL, SKIN, AT THE VANISHING POINT, CONCERNING STRANGE DEVICES FROM THE DISTANT WEST, LAST FIREFLY, CITIZEN 13559, and WAR OF THE WORLDS (a collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company.) Her plays have been produced at theatres across the country including Berkeley Rep, the Goodman Theatre, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, the Guthrie Theater, Cornerstone Theater Company, Children’s Theater Company, Seattle Children’s Theatre Company, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the Huntington Theatre Company, Portland Center Stage, the Public Theater, Dallas Theater Center, and Soho Rep. Iizuka’s plays have been published by Overlook Press, Playscripts, Smith and Kraus, Dramatic Publishing, and TCG. lizuka is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, a Joyce Foundation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, an NEA/TCG Artist‑in‑Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a PEN Center USA West Award for Drama, a Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Fellowship. Her play GOOD KIDS was commissioned by the Big Ten Consortium’s New Play Initiative and has been produced at universities nationwide. Recent projects include an adaptation of SLEEP by Haruki Murakami which premiered at the 2017 BAM Next Wave Festival and was a New York Times Critics Pick, and WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, a play written in collaboration with US Marine Corps combat veterans and their families, and produced by La Jolla Playhouse and Cornerstone Theater Company. Iizuka was the 2017 Berlind Playwright-in-Residence at Princeton University. In 2018 she worked as a writer and story editor for Season 2 of THE TERROR on the AMC network which will air in 2019. She currently heads the MFA Playwriting program at UC-San Diego.

 

To begin, think on what is it that haunts you as as a writer. Free write for around 5 mins- Naomi calls this ‘swimming’

 

If you want to continue working on your ghost story- Naomi has shared with additional tasks

 

 

Patricia Cornelius- Live from Melbourne, Australia 

Lovely, lovely, sometimes ugly dialogue- Recommended 14+

In this workshop Patricia Cornelius focuses specifically on writing dialogue for the stage.

Patricia is a founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre. She is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist. T Patricia has written over thirty-five plays and they include: Big Heart, SHIT, Do Not Go Gentle, The Call, Love, Fever, Boy Overboard, Slut and Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (with Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves and Irine Vela).

Her prizes for stage work include the 2011 Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards, the Patrick White Playwright’s Award, the Richard Wherrett Prize, the Wal Cherry Award and numerous AWGIES for stage, community theatre, theatre for young people. She won the prestigious Australian Writers Foundation Playwriting Award in 2015 as well as the Patrick White Fellowship (2012), and a Fellowship from the Australia Council’s Theatre Board. Patricia has won the AWGIE Major Award three times. She has recently been awarded the 2018 Mona Brand Playwrighting Award,

 

 

 

Abhishek Majumdar- Live from India- Jawaharla Nehru in Delhi

On Writing the Personal, Political and Philosophical

The workshop will give an overview of different concepts and ideas that have engaged playwrights in the Indian Subcontinent over the years. The workshop will not delineate ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ or ‘eastern’ and ‘western’, or engage in any such narrow binaries and will look at playwriting more comprehensively and encourage a discourse that is contextually situated in Indian socio-cultural and political climate rather than essentializing ‘Indian’ playwriting as a form.

Abhishek Majumdar is a playwright and theatre director based in Bangalore, India. He is the artistic director of the Indian Ensemble. His plays have been performed both nationally and internationally. Majumdar has trained in Delhi, Pondicherry, and Bangalore. He also is an alumnus of the London International School of Performing Arts. Abhishek Majumdar has received the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship, the Inlaks Scholarship, the Lispa Scholarship, and the Robert Bosch Arts Grant. He is a member of the Young Vic Director’s network, London and was at the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab in 2012.

 

 

Suzan-Lori Parks – Live from USA, with the Public Theater

WATCH ME WORK 

Something a little different here- we were gven access to Suzan-Lori Parks WATCH ME WORK. A performance art piece, a meditation on the artistic process, an actual work session and a writing class,

Following an informal work session livestreamed to the Writeaplay website where both teacher and participating playwrights write together, Suzan-Lori will took questions from the writing group and twitter about their own plays and their own work.  Suzan-Lori is teaming up with The Public Theater of New York’s Emerging Writers Group, where she will help them explore the universes of their plays, get into some vibrant conversations, and help each writer deepen the ways their work respond to the world around us.

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed playwrights in American drama today. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, and in 2015 was awarded the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts.  Other grants and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant.