2008 Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition Winner
Goliath by Karen Hartman
In the contemporary Middle East, who is David and who is Goliath? On the eve of the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip, an American settler, her zealous teenage son, a Palestinian worker, an Israeli army commander, and a young Ethiopian Jewish soldier battle over ideology, economics, and home.
Staged reading is Wednesday, April 30 7:30pm
Studio Theatre, Cleveland Play House
FusionFest 2008
To purchase tickets:
Contact the Cleveland Play House Box Office: 216-795-7000
About Karen Hartman
Karen Hartman is the author of seventeen plays produced by more than fifty companies worldwide. In 2004, GOING GONE premiered on the main stage at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, receiving a Special Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The same year, ANATOMY 1968 ran in Arielle Tepper’s Summer Play Festival on Theater Row, and the short play HANG TEN was produced by Women’s Project & Productions in THE ANTIGONE PROJECT. In 2005, Ms. Hartman was a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study & Conference Center in Italy, writing a new play, GOLIATH, commissioned by McCarter Theatre and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Other recent projects include work on a musical book for Broadway, THE 5000 FINGERS OF DR. T, and a contemporary female version of the Don Juan legend commissioned by A.C.T. in San Francisco, entitled DONNA WANTS.
Gum received its world premiere at Center Stage in Baltimore, its west coast premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, its New York premiere at Women's Project & Productions, and continues to be widely performed. It is published as a trade paperback by Theatre Communications Group (Nick Hern in the UK) and an acting edition by Dramatists Play Service, together with The Mother of Modern Censorship. Girl Under Grain, commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, was named Best Drama in the New York International Fringe Festival. ALICE: Tales of a Curious Girl, adapted from Lewis Carroll with music by Gina Leishman, was commissioned and produced by the Dallas Theater Center, receiving an AT&T OnStage Award. Blessings and Curses, with Malashock Dance & Company, won San Diego’s Dance Alliance Tommy Award and a Patté Award for Outstanding Theater. Other works include Leah’s Train and Troy Women, adapted from Euripides and first produced by the Yale Repertory Theater/Yale School of Drama, which was recently published in Backstage Books’ anthology, Divine Fire.
Karen Hartman is the librettist of the opera MotherBone, composed by Graham Reynolds, which won the Frederick Loewe Award in New Music Theatre and broke attendance records at Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, and the author of a collection of autobiographical prose pieces, Semiprecious: Notes from a Material World. Together with Laura Flanagan and Chris Wells, she performs these pieces around New York under the title, Are We Not Grownups?
She has been honored with a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, the Daryl Roth “Creative Spirit” Award, a residency at the National Theatre in London, a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Jerusalem. Her work has been supported by the Helen Merrill Foundation, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, La Jolla Playhouse, MacDowell Colony, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Voice & Vision, Playwrights’ Horizons, and South Coast Repertory, among many others.
Karen Hartman is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and serves as a writer representative on its Board of Directors. She earned an M.F.A. in Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama (A.S.C.A.P. Cole Porter Prize, Truman Capote Fellowship, Foster Family Scholarship) and a B.A. in Literature with honors from Yale University (Veech Writing Prize), and has returned to teach in both programs. She lives in Brooklyn.
Funding for the competition is generously provided by the Zeilinger Family
