Four Juilliard playwrights will be featured at Florida Stage in Manalapan, Fla. (outside Palm Beach) as part of the theater’s New Voices series. Deborah Laufer, Julia Jordan, Ellen Melaver, and David Adjmi were selected by Joe Kraemer, literary manager of Juilliard’s Drama Division, to have their scripts submitted to Florida Stage for consideration. Louis Tyrrell, director of Florida Stage, selected all four scripts to be performed in the play reading series.

Deborah Laufer

New Voices, in its 10th season at Florida Stage, consists of informal professional readings of new and developmental plays. The audience is given the opportunity to discuss the work with the actors, director, and playwright. Tyrrell explains, "A play reading series such as New Voices is an important step for any play on its way to production. It breathes life into the play, giving the playwright the chance to continue work on it, and it also gives the audience the chance to be a part of developing a new work."

Tyrrell is also a member of the Juilliard Council, a distinguished group of volunteer alumni and friends of Juilliard. The Council’s mission is to promote the School, expand Juilliard’s circle of supporters, and participate in special events that bring added visibility to Juilliard’s activities. "The connection between Florida Stage and Juilliard is both professional and artistic," says Tyrrell. "Florida Stage is dedicated to the development of new plays, and New Voices provides the perfect fit for Juilliard graduates who are looking for a place in which to perform their work."

The first play featured at Florida Stage was a great success. Deborah Laufer’s The Last Schwartz was performed on January 7. "The audience had me talking for hours," says Laufer. The Last Schwartz tells the story of the Schwartzes, for whom family means everything. At a traditional gathering meant to express their unity, each member of the Schwartz family has found his or her own path through family to personal isolation. The play’s intent is to show that, in the name of family and religion, the most cherished expressions of the human experiment can also inspire human behavior at its most damaging.

Ellen Melaver

The next New Voices offering, beginning February 25, is Julia Jordan’s Smoking Lesson, a play about three 15-year-old girls who spend time underneath a bridge on the Mississippi River, talking and remembering their friend, who died seven years earlier. An attractive young man finds them in their secret place and befriends them. According to Jordan, a 1996 alumna of Juilliard’s Playwrights Program, the plot is about determining if this man is responsible for their friend’s death. The tension of the play comes from one of the girls being attracted to the man. Jordan says she doesn’t know what kind of reaction to expect from the audience. "The biggest thrill for me is that my 93-year-old grand mother, who lives 20 minutes from Florida Stage, will be seeing my work for the first time."

The Baby and the Brie, by current Juilliard playwright fellow Ellen Melaver, will be performed April 15. Melaver wrote the play a year and a half ago, and submitted it to apply to Juilliard. Melaver says that she is excited for this opportunity to have her work read outside of New York. The Baby and the Brie is about an ambitious Upper West Side woman, Maggie, whose life revolves around being in control. The character is the Chief Financial Officer of the P.Q. Project, which tests the "potential" of babies for very specific things, such as how well they’ll pick mutual funds or order bottles of wine. Maggie just had a baby herself and keeps losing it, leaving the baby in a variety of places. "When I started writing it, I knew this was going to be about a new mother, but I also knew it was going to be absurd, comic, and yet rooted in something more serious," says Melaver.

Louis Tyrell, director of Florida Stage.

The last of the New Voices readings will be Strange Attractors by current Juilliard play wright David Adjmi, to be performed on May 20. "It’s sort of a free adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll House," says Adjmi. "I updated it, hollowed it out and imbued it with more contemporary issues and references." The story is about a Long Island woman named Betsy and her interactions with her MTV executive husband as he falls mysteriously ill, and as she begins an extra-marital relationship to pay for his cure. Adjmi says he looks forward to going down to Florida to see his work performed. "I think it’s exciting because it’s sort of a major theater; I’ve never had my work done at a big subscription house, and this theater has a really interesting audience base. I’ve heard that the place has gotten kind of young and edgy, and I look forward to seeing what that’s all about."

Juilliard’s director of national advancement, Sarah Roth, says that this kind of collaboration between Juilliard and Florida Stage is important for the School and for performing arts audiences around the country. "This is a wonderful example of Juilliard’s national presence. My goal is to bring Juilliard’s talent to audiences who can’t come to us, while reaching out to the philanthropic communities outside our traditional supporter base in New York."

The synergy between Juilliard and Florida will continue with Juilliard’s first concert in Palm Beach this March, marking preparations for a Juilliard concert series at Florida Stage that is to begin in 2003.

Meredith Gordon is development associate for national advancement in the Alumni Office.