Theatre and Dance

Department of Theatre and Dance

Chrysalis

Jenny Connell

Jenny Connell

Jenny Connell is a first year Master of Fine Arts Playwright with an effervescent personality and an ambitious spark in her eyes. Known for being able to churn out plays at an astonishingly fast pace, Jenny says that she has written so many new works since August, "that my professors are teasing me about it." Her dedication to producing new dramatic work is paying off in great measures already.

Jenny's play Chrysalis was selected to be workshopped and showcased at "Play Right", a week-long national M.F.A. 10-minute play competition and program in Aspen, Colorado as part of a new Theater Masters program for playwrights.

Theater Masters is a non-profit arts organization based in Colorado that seeks to nurture the development of new works for the theatre. The organization's founder and Artistic Director, Julia Hansen, is known for conceiving and launching The Directors Project, a national training program for young directors while she was President of the Drama League of New York. Much like The Directors Project's mission to nurture new talent, Theater Masters is designed to find up-and-coming playwrights and showcase their work across the country.

Jenny with Play Right participants.

Left to Right: Jenny Connell (UT Austin), J.P. Nichol
(Carnegie Mellon), Thomas Diggs (NYU), and
Rachael Brogan (UCLA)

Seeking to discover the brightest dramatists of the new generation, Theatre Masters invited universities from across the country to submit works for the inaugural National "Play Right" program. These works were judged by Hansen, dramatist John Guare, and Lane Savadove, Artistic Director of EgoPro Productions and Associate Director of the Theater Masters M.F.A. program. The plays selected feature nine playwrights from nine universities, including UT Austin, UC San Diego, UCLA, University of Iowa, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Colombia, NYU, and Brown.

Chrysalis is a piece that explores love, memory, and the space between this life and the next. Jenny initially wrote it for "Once Upon a Weekend," a Department of Theatre and Dance event hosted at the beginning of each fall semester. As Jenny recalls, "Everyone had 24 hours to write a play that incorporated several prompts from faculty members. The ones I (and most people) chose were: reincarnation, a ventriloquist, a paper airplane, the line "it's so much bigger than I thought it would be," and three doors. My friend, Mary Chase, and I decided to work together on something. She's a choreographer, so she choreographed a piece that incorporated these prompts and I wrote a six-minute play that did, too, and we performed them together."

Coincidentally, this original version of Chrysalis-one that includes choreographic movement-was chosen to be produced in the University Co-op presents the Cohen New Works Festival April 9-15, 2007.

The written script without the choreography was selected for "Play Right" in Aspen. Jenny recalls her experience:

"Aspen was amazing. I got a chance to meet M.F.A. students from 8 other playwriting programs, coast to coast, and to work with a great professional director, recently of Cornerstone, who had some ideas for how to further the piece. We all were on a panel at the Aspen Institute and got to see our pieces performed by a combination of local, LA and NYC actors. The highlight of the weekend, though, was getting the chance to talk to people at other M.F.A. programs. Everyone had good stories to tell."

You can catch Chrysalis in the B. Iden Payne Theatre on April 12 at 7:30 pm, April 13 at 3:00 pm, and April 14 at 5:30 pm as part of the 2007 University Co-op presents the Cohen New Works Festival.

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