In Playbook an elite team of improvisers from ImprovBoston will do in 75 minutes what it takes most playwrights years to do -- they will complete an unfinished script. Each week improvisers will take on the first page of an unfinished script from a working playwright. The first page is the inspiration and the quick-witted improvisers have 75 minutes to create a one-act play before the audience’s eyes. 

Jami Brandli is an award-winning playwright who has had productions across thecountry. She was a Visiting Artist at the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive, a contributing writer for the Elliot Norton Award-Winning production of PS: Page Me Later, a finalist for the Disney ABC's TV Writing Fellowship, and a Visiting Playwright for the 2009 ATHE Conference. She also has short plays published with Smith & Kraus. Her play, Technicolor Life, was awarded the 2010 John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award and developed at the 2010 WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab In addition to being a winning play at the 2010 Ashland New Plays Festival, Technicolor Life was also a finalist for the 2010 Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, the 2010/2011 Global Age Project New Works Program at The Aurora Theatre and the 2011 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

 

 

Faith Soloway has been hailed by critics and audiences as one of the best and brightest of the Boston area's singer-songwriters. What distinguishes her from the rest of the pack in this crowed scene is the theatrical nature of her shows. Whether singing with her animated, energetic band, The Faith Soloway Crisis, or creating and performing in one of her many comedic "Schlock Operas," Faith has built a very large and very devoted following because she provides the folk-scene with attributes it so desperately needs: humor, showmanship and, most of all, humility.

 

 

With over twenty years of experience, James Ferguson has been hired to write numerous screenplays, blogs and sketch comedy projects; his plays have been produced throughout The United States and in London. He is also the author of two novels. In October of 2012, his short play Ori & Addison was one of 40 plays selected (from over 900 submissions) to participate in The 37th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival at The Beckett Theatre in New York City. Awards include: Best Play, Best Director and Best Actress at The 6th Annual Long Island City One Act Festival, produced by The Secret Theater in NYC; Best Play at Word*Play, produced by InterMedia Arts in MN and Best Play at The Writer Speaks 20 at The Secret Rose Theatre in Los Angeles.

 

 

Jeffrey Sweet is an American writer, journalist, songwriter and theatre historian. Sweet has been a playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, critic, journalist, teacher, theatre historian, and sometime songwriter and director. He is a resident member of Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater, where thirteen of his plays—including Flyovers, The Action Against Sol Schumann, The Value of Names, Berlin '45, With and Without, Court-Martial at Fort Devens, and Bluff have been produced. Sweet is also the author of Something Wonderful Right Away (an oral history of Chicago's The Second City), The Dramatist's Toolkit and Solving Your Script.

 

 

Melinda Lopez is a playwright and actress, and was the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award, given by the Kennedy Center to a "promising new voice in American Theatre." Her play Sonia Flew, which was developed and premiered by the Huntington Theatre Company, won the Elliot Norton Award for Best New Play and two IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Awards for Best Play and Best Production. It has subsequently been produced at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Laguna Playhouse, Ariel Tepper's Summer Play Festival (NY), the Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR), and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. The play has been broadcast on NPR's "The Play's The Thing!" in a production by L.A. Theatre Works with a cast that included Elizabeth Peña and Hector Elizondo. Most recently, her play Gary was produced at Steppenwolf Theatre's First Look Play Festival in Chicago and, in March 2008, at Boston Playwrights' Theatre where it was nominated for an Elliot Norton Award by the Boston Theatre Critics Association.