Janet Allard and Carlyle Brown Receive Core Alumni Fund Support

Former Core Writers Janet Allard and Carlyle Brown are the latest playwrights to receive support from the Playwrights' Center's Core Alumni Fund.

Launched in fall 2010, the Core Alumni Fund provides microgrants to past participants in the Playwrights' Center's Core Writer program to continue work on projects begun at the Playwrights' Center. The initiative underscores the Playwrights' Center's commitment to serving as an artistic resource for playwrights long after their official term at the Center has concluded.

Janet Allard, who served as a Core Writer from 2006 to 2009, developed her satirical play Vrooommm!: A NASComedy in the Playwrights' Center's 2005 PlayLabs Festival. The play has since gone on to production at several theaters across the country. Allard will use a grant from the Core Alumni Fund to collaborate with the theatrical pop trio GrooveLily to convert the play into a country-western musical.

"Being a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center gave me an artistic home," Allard said. "The Core Alumni Fund is an extension of that. It not only connects me to the Playwrights' Center and the vibrant artistic community of Minneapolis, but allows me to further a work that began at the Playwrights' Center by taking it to Los Angeles and forming new relationships and a new incarnation of the work with new collaborators."

Carlyle Brown, a Core Writer from 2007 to 2010, recently used a grant to fund a reading of his play American Family at the Playwrights' Center. American Family was commissioned by Park Square Theatre, where it will premiere in March 2012, produced in partnership with Brown's production company, Carlyle Brown & Company. Brown called the opportunity to hear the play out loud "a critical moment in the evolution of a play from the page to the stage."

The Playwrights' Center's Core Writer program is intended to significantly further a playwright's career by giving playwrights access to a number of resources, including play development workshops with professional actors, directors, dramaturgs, and designers. Core Writers may also apply to have their work presented in the Playwrights' Center's annual PlayLabs Festival and Ruth Easton New Play Series. Core Writers are selected by a panel of distinguished theater artists for a three-year, renewable term. For more information or to apply, please visit http://www.pwcenter.org/lab_corewriters.php?s=1.

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Bios

Janet Allard is a playwright and bookwriter/lyricist. Her plays are published by Samuel French and Playscripts, Inc. Ms. Allard is the recipient of two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights' Center. Her work has been seen at The Guthrie Lab, The Kennedy Center, Mixed Blood, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, The Yale Cabaret, The Women's Project, Perseverance Theatre, Joe’s Pub, with P73 Productions, NYMF, SPF, and Internationally in Ireland, England, Greece, Australia and New Zealand. She is a Fulbright Fellow, has an M.F.A in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, and has studied at NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program.  She currently teaches playwriting at UNCG in North Carolina.

Carlyle Brown is a playwright, actor, and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company, which he founded in Minneapolis in 2002. Known for his historical works about African Americans, Brown's most famous play is The African Company Presents Richard the Third (premiered in 1987), about the first African American theatrical company's staging of the first black public performances of Shakespeare. Brown has received commissions from Arena Stage and the Houston Grand Opera, among others. He is the 2006 recipient of the Black Theatre Network's Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2010 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre, and a 2010 United States Artists Fellowship.