Melanie Marnich's plays include Quake, Blur, Tallgrass Gothic, Calling All, Beautiful Again, These Shining Lives, and The Storm Coming. Her awards include two McKnight Advancement Grants and two Jerome Fellowships from the Playwrights' Center, the Samuel Goldwyn Award, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award and the Melvoin Award from Northlight Theatre (Chicago). Her plays have been produced or developed at New York's Public Theater, London's Royal Court Theatre, Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, Portland Center Stage, The Actors Studio, Geva Theatre, Hyde Park Theatre, American Theater Company, HERE and Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Commissions include the Kennedy Center, Guthrie Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Arena Stage and South Coast Repertory. She is a Core Writer of the Playwrights' Center, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and a writer on the Showtime series The Big C.

Ansa Akyea (2000 M.F.A.) is the proud recipient of the prestigious 2011 Playwrights' Center McKnight Theater Artist Fellowship for acting. An accomplished and versatile actor, he has also been named City Pages' 2007 Best Actor. Ansa has worked throughout the country from the stage to the big screen. He can be seen in movies such as Into Temptation and the upcoming hit Memorial Day. His onstage work has been seen in the Twin Cities at the Guthrie Theater, Children's Theatre Company, Mixed Blood Theatre, Penumbra Theatre and many others. When he is not developing his own work or looking for new opportunities and challenges, Ansa likes to spend his time with his family. Ansa is a proud graduate of the University of Iowa's Acting Program. Check him out at ansaakyea.com

Theater: Guthrie: H.M.S. Pinafore, The Winter's Tale, The Great Gatsby, She Loves Me, A Christmas Carol, The Pirates of Penzance, The Comedy of Errors; Kansas City Rep: The Pirates of Penzance; American Repertory Theatre: Carmen, Figaro, Don Juan Giovanni; Berkeley Rep: Figaro; Theatre de la Jeune Lune: Figaro, Don Juan Giovanni, Mefistofele, Maria de Buenos Aires, Carmen, Circus of Tales, The Man Who Laughs, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute; Moving Company: Werther and Lotte, Come Hell and High Water; Ordway: Grey Gardens, Beauty and the Beast; Park Square Theatre: Well; Minnesota Orchestra: Hansel and Gretel; History Theatre: Sisters of Swing. Film: Flourtown, Jona/Tomberry. Training: University of Minnesota; Lawrence University Conservatory of Music.

Theater: Guthrie: Arsenic and Old Lace, A Christmas Carol (three productions since 2007), Romeo and Juliet (with The Acting Company), The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A View from the Bridge, The Government Inspector, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Faith Healer (directing intern); Jungle Theater: Hamlet; Minnesota Centennial Showboat: Forty-five Minutes from Broadway; Theatre L'Homme Dieu: Biloxi Blues, Jack and the Beanstalk, You Can't Take It With You. Film: Hope, Last Breath. Awards: Presidential Scholar of the Arts. Training: University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater B.F.A. Actor Training Program; Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London.

Broadway and Broadway tour: August: Osage County. National and regional tours: Ah, Wilderness, Great Expectations (Guthrie Theater); The Miser (Theatre de la Jeune Lune); Gertrude Stein and a Companion (Jungle Theater). Select regional theater: A Skull in Connemara (Baltimore Center Stage); August: Osage County, Panic, Retreat From Moscow, The Waltz of the Toreadors (Park Square Theatre); Three Viewings (Illusion Theater); Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet, The Night of the Iguana, Once in a Lifetime, The Man Who Came To Dinner, Death of a Salesman, Front Page (Guthrie Theater); The Miser, Tartuffe—Twin Cities Kudos Award (Theatre de la Jeune Lune); Tamarack, The Glass Menagerie, The House of Blue Leaves, Tennessee Williams One-Acts, Old Times, Gertrude Stein and a Companion (the Jungle Theater); Twelfth Night, The Good Person of Sechwan, King Lear, The Furies, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Measure For Measure, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Ten Thousand Things). Playwriting: Living In The Blue Zone, 9Thirty Theatre Co.; Proof of Me by Degree: Emily Dickinson, Morningside College.

Theater: Guthrie: More than 35 productions since 1998 including Arsenic and Old Lace, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Caretaker, The Government Inspector, The Ugly One, Private Lives and The Sex Habits of American Women; History Theatre: Wellstone!; Ten Thousand Things Theater: Doubt, Red Noses, Iphigenia, Raskol; Thirst Theater; Jungle Theater: The Blue Room; Utah Classical Greek Theater Company: The Bacchae; Salt Lake Acting Company: Sight Unseen; Creede Rep: Voice of the Prairie, Bedroom Farce, Antigone; Shakespeare Theatre Company: Richard II, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet. Awards: 2008 City Pages Best Actor; 2007 Ivey Award. Training: University of Utah Actors Training Program

Sonja Parks has performed at many notable venues around the country including: The Public Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, the Kennedy Center and the Boston Center for the Arts. Her Twin Cities credits include the Guthrie Theater, the Children's Theatre Company, Penumbra Theatre, Ten Thousand Things and Pillsbury House Theatre. She also has extensive television, commercial and film credits. She studied at the University of Texas, the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the National Black Theatre in New York. Sonja is the recipient of a 2000 NEA grant; a 2002 Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship; a 2005 McKnight Artist Fellowship; was named Best Actress in the Twin Cities—2004, has two Minneapolis Ivey Awards (Acting—2009 and Directing—2010), has been a featured artist in Time Magazine and named one of Seven Artist You Must See by American Theatre magazine. She currently teaches acting as a member of the Theatre Arts faculty at the University of Minnesota.

Sara Richardson has performed with a wide variety of theatres in and around the Twin Cities. Recent credits include Buzzer (Pillsbury House Theatre), Flesh and the Desert (Workhaus Collective) and Mercy Watson to the Rescue! (Children's Theatre Company). Trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, Sara is active in the Twin Cities' collaborative and physical theatre community, has shown her own work at NY Clown Theatre Festival and Southern Theater, among others, and is a company member of Theatre Forever (formerly Jon Ferguson Theater). Film work includes the award-winning independent feature, Rough Tender, and numerous short films. Sara also occasionally costumes, directs, teaches, and pretends to be a jazz singer.

Leah Cooper has been directing, producing, and performing in theater for over twenty-five years. Locally, she has directed productions for Park Square Theatre, Theatre in the Round, Gremlin Theater, 20% Theatre Company, Shakespearean Youth Theatre, Starting Gate Productions, Ministry of Cultural Warfare, Prufrock Theatre, Cromulent Shakespeare Company, Fortune's Fool Productions, and the Fringe Festival as well as many workshops of new scripts. Leah is also the Executive Director of the Minnesota Theater Alliance, a partner and co-founder of MinnesotaPlaylist.com, and board chair for Live Action Set.

Ben McGovern was most recently the Associate Director of Studio Programming at the Guthrie Theater, where he has directed Adam Rapp's The Edge of Our Bodies, Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation, Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One and Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. He was also the associate director of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, with director Joe Dowling in the role of Frank Harding. Prior to the Guthrie, he worked with Theatre de la Jeune Lune as an assistant director, actor, stage manager, writer, and just about everything else. Jeune Lune productions include Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream; Crusoe, Friday and the Island of Hope; Scapin; Queen; The Man Who Laughs; Yang Zen Froggs; Cyrano de Bergerac; Tartuffe; 3 Musketeers; The Deception and Antigone. He was a founding member of the performance group Chopping Block, where he directed and/or co-wrote several plays, including The Bald Soprano, The Adding Machine, Serendipity and Gumball Geezus. He was the Artistic Director of the Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater, where he directed Leonce and Lena and Mac Wellman's 7 Blowjobs, among others. Other directing credits include Thirty Days in Frogtown, Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth.