Austin Playwrights

The playwrights of Austin Script Works are continuing to gain ground in their takeover of the American theatre. Up in Minnesota, Abi Basch and Kimberly Burke are two of the five writers to receive this year's Jerome Fellowships, administered by the Playwrights' Center. Basch had a Jerome last year, but scored a repeat fellowship on the basis of her script Fear of a Fuhrer, seen in ASW's PulseWorks Festival last October.

Burke won on the strength of her play Lacuna, which will be staged at UT this April in the David Mark Cohen New Works Festival. For more information, visit www.coopnwf.org.

Over in Indiana, Sarah Myer, a UT MFA candidate, has won the Bonderman Award for her science-fiction play The Realm. It will be developed and presented in the 2004-2005 Waldo M. and Grace C. Bonderman Playwriting for Youth National Symposium.

Steve Moore's Nightswim, which premiered at the State Theater last fall, is a finalist for the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg New Play Award. Back in Minnesota, both Carson Kreitzer, who received an ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award citation in 2004 for The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and ASW Artistic Director C. Denby Swanson have plays that are semifinalists for this year's PlayLabs, a nationally recognized play-development workshop at the Playwrights' Center. Kreitzer's is Flesh and the Desert, which will also be in the New Works Festival at UT; Swanson's is A Brief Narrative of an Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits. And over in Washington, Swanson's play Atomic Farmgirl is an alternate for the Women Playwrights Festival, co-produced by Seattle Repertory Theatre and Hedgebrook. For more information call 454-9727.