Launched in 2018, the Table Series gives members the opportunity to work with a dramaturg/director on their new play and experience it read by members of the WTP Actor’s Ensemble with moderated feedback throughout the evening.
The Table Series does not culminate in a finished product, but in a new stage of process: opening up the text to artists with fresh perspectives and the questions of a professional cast. Bringing together a team of actors, a dramaturg/director to lead the room and an intimate audience to respond, this series features four or five readings every year. In an effort to replicate the first rehearsal of a (29 hour style) workshop, each reading happens in one evening. We are excited to offer our members and ensemble exclusive access into what actually happens within WTP’s new play development spaces.
Arts organizations can enrich your life. I came to Working Title Playwrights three years ago as a closeted theater artist seeking guidance, community, and fulfillment too, of an irrational, frustrated passion to express things that have never been expressed before. As a playwright in the Table Series program this spring, I found all three.
The Table Series is a delightful experience. Gently by a dramaturge you are drawn into the fold, where you’ll meet a director that has been handpicked just for you. Next, you will get to meet your motley crew of exuberant actors, some of the Southeast’s very finest, who will weigh and pronounce your words in wonderful and unexpected ways. There will be rousing discussion, and emotional outpours, and disagreements too, though always constructive ones, and with more than enough camaraderie to balance any artistic challenges you may face. But most importantly there will be insights, about your work and the role you have played by making it. And these hardwon insights! They will continue to grow and to permeate your attentions, long after you have STOOD up from the table, pushed in your chair, and wished all your supporters and players a heartfelt goodnight.
Working Title Playwrights, in the two decades of its existence, has enriched the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people throughout Atlanta and beyond. I consider myself fortunate to have been one of them. It is a vital part of our community, and well deserves our recognition and support. – Nathan Jerpe, WTP Member
Above: The 2022 Table Series featuring the cast and team for EPIDERMIS by Nathan Jerpe – Stephen Ruffin, Anthony Goolsby, Antonia LaChe’, Nathan Jerpe, Jim Davis, Lau’rie Roach and Wendy Melkonian.
2023 DEADLINE: TBA
Past panelists for the Table Series: Celise Kalke, Greg Carraway, Paul Donnelly, Liz Dooley, Cassie Gonzales, Jean Hedgecock, Sloka Krishnan, Emily McClain, Daphne Mintz, Ibi Owolabi, Theroun D’Arcy Patterson, Lucy Smith, Rebekah Suellau and Michael Winn.
2022 Table Series @ Theatrical Outfit
MAY 17: Epidermis by Nathan Jerpe, Dramaturg/Director Jim Davis
A brand-new episode from the pages of Flay’s Anatomy! Meet the cast and crew of the good ship Incontinence, as they gather for a surrealist pleasure cruise into the wonders of the nineteenth century. With a nigh disastrous rump injection behind him, the fearless Captain Livereaux has steered things aright at last, but aboard his beloved ship, the passengers may have other plans. Meanwhile the weather is growing more intelligent! Join us for this heady dose of anatomical theatre, which probes the limits of rhyme and reason and invites us to ask a question pertinent to our own day – when we watch the show, is the show also watching us?
MAY 24: Ada’s Husband Passed by Dr. Carlton Molette, Dramaturg/Director Addae Moon
Clarence was Colored in Virginia where they live, but White in Washington, D.C. where he worked. Local authorities “discover” Clarence was White and prohibit his burial in a Black cemetery. Was Clarence a White man passing for Black, or a Black man passing for White? Army records say “Caucasian,” marriage papers say “Negro,” and his birth certificate was destroyed in a natural disaster. Ada is a public school teacher, and “interracial marriage” is illegal in Virginia. Was Ada legally married? Are her children “illegitimate?” Will she lose her job, her pension, and her dignity?
JUNE 14: Better Dead Than Alive by Hank Kimmel, Dramaturg/Director Lauren Morris
Mordecai Cash is a poor but ambitious insurance adjuster who’s been sent to a remote mountain town to investigate the veracity of a tragic truck crash. When Cash arrives at the funeral, the Church administrator (Rita) thinks he’s the Minister who’s been sent to conduct the funeral and bring the Church of the Holy Hill back to solvency. When truck driver Lucien turns out to be alive, “Reverend” Cash must decide whether to report the truth or go along with a scheme that would leave him, the Church, Lucien’s “widow” (Wanda), best friend (Hector) and mistress (Maria) richer beyond their wildest dreams.
JUNE 28: Spicy White by Quinn Xavier Hernandez, Dramaturg/Director Sofia Palmero
Gabriel and Ana Teresa are the closest of friends until Gabriel is adopted by a white family, starts going by Gabe, and stops speaking Spanish. When Ana confronts him, it leads to a falling out that forces them to face the complexities of race, Latinidad, and accountability for the rest of their lives. SPICY WHITE is an intimate but scathing examination of the intersections of identity that asks white-passing individuals to consider their role in white supremacy.
JULY 19: Salvage by Mary Lynn Owen, Dramaturg/Director Addae Moon
A year after Father’s death, Mother sends an urgent email to her adult children, summoning them home to collect their things. In a room strewn with the stuff of their lives – forgotten toys, photo albums, clothes, books, and one errant tape recorder – this interracial, intergenerational family of Mother, Sister, Brother, and Grandpa collides with the past and present, faces the truth of one another’s lives, and weighs what to keep, what to throw away, and what to make into something new.
2020 Virtual Table Series
JULY 29: Copper Angel By Emily McClain, Dramaturgy by Rebekah Suellau
During WWII, American artist and sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd travels to France with her husband, and is deeply impacted by the men she meets at the hospital that are coming home from war. She learns how to create facial masks for the men sustaining disfiguring facial injuries, despite the misgivings of her husband and the lack of trust from the men she seeks to treat. This play explores the journey of healing our wounds, seen or unseen.
AUG 25: Chorus of Bears by Lucy Smith, Dramaturgy By Amber Bradshaw
A one-woman show about motherhood, mystery and the animal kingdom. A woman becomes a mother and it connect her to more than she could ever imagine. She asks th audience, herself and the Chorus of Bears to help her transform and surrender to who she is in order to meet the calling of love and forgiveness.
SEPT 29: Red Summer by Theroun D’Arcy Patterson, Dramaturgy by Addae Moon
A little light shines on a memory: a boy stands nervously on a mound of sand, self-conscious and sixteen years old in a hand-me-down swimsuit. Sea birds cast shadows. The slow swell and crash of the ocean fills the space. The boy kicks off his shoes and rushes to the water’s edge. Suddenly, in the water, is a beautiful white woman wearing a white swimsuit and cap. The boy freezes; terrified. It is summer…1919.
DEC 1: Harina Pan by Sofia Palmero, Dramaturgy by Kathryn de La Rosa
When Mariana sneaks out of her house in the middle of the night to meet up with the alluring, non-binary Ryan, three things happen: her first kiss, her first gay panic, and her first time getting caught sneaking out. But when the cops show up, Ryan bails, leaving Mariana to deal with the aftermath when her mom comes to get her. Harina Pan is a coming-of-age story about queerness, Latinidad, and the power of truth and love.
2019 Table Series
at the Synchronicity Annex
OCT 1: Maybe Politics Are Over by Sloka Krishnan, Dramaturgy by Amber Bradshaw
In a world too much like our own, four politicians jockey for power and grapple with desire; three women fight passionlessly for change they can’t envision; and three outcasts retreat to the woods to find peace they can’t in good conscience sustain. Moving with the lightning speed of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, rich with music and movement, filthy with sex and boiling with rage, Maybe Politics Are Over renders catharsis at its most confrontational.
NOV 12: Tragedy at 236 Tigerlily by Greg Carraway, Dramaturgy by Rebekah Suellau
On a cold, snowy Friday evening, in a modern working class neighborhood, a police car pulls up to the house that sits smack in the middle of a collection of bungalows. As more police cars, ambulances, a crime scene van and an officer named George Washington crowd up in front of the house at 236, neighbors Charles, Jack, Kyle and Lydia crowd up in Scott and Javier’s living room window. They gawk, gossip, and knock back tequila shots, gradually revealing a web of secret entanglements with the shunned neighbors at 236 that could implicate each one of them in the tragedy.
DEC 9: Circumschism by Roger Stroud, Dramaturgy by Mira Hirsch
On the eve of a pivotal convening of the leaders of the first church, future saints Peter and Paul, along with Mother Mary and Jesus’ brother James, meet in the Jerusalem home of a wealthy patron to debate the church’s prospective course. Wine is served, seductions are made and matters of both flesh and faith are fervently argued as this extraordinary assemblage of leaders determines the very future of Christianity.
2018 Table Series
AUG 21: The Virgin Wild by Daniel Glenn Dramaturgy by Rebekah Suellau at The Windmill Arts Center
The American frontier is abuzz when the Deflowerer, a mysterious middle-aged blind man, comes with his eunuch sidekick all the way from France to perform a public service and collect the maidenheads of eligible bachelorettes. But the work stalls when a callow fellow named Widward appears, claiming to be the man’s son. Loss of innocence moves from the personal to the political in this sex comedy parable, which offers a vision of a country spiraling out of control as hearts struggle to keep pace with the changing world around them.
SEPT 23: Son of the Father by Ian Gibson Dramaturgy by Mia Kristin Smith at Actor’s Express
What if Mary lied? Son Of The Father comedically blasphemes the story of Jesus using characters we know and love. Mary and Longinus are in love – but Mary is being forced to marry Joseph. Things get complicated and stories are…made up. Everything that happens in the bible happens in Son Of The Father, but for entirely different reasons. Son Of The Father tells a story we know well, in a way that we would never expect. Come prepared to laugh so hard you cry.
FEB 11: The Rake’s Progress by Hank Kimmel Dramaturgy by Celise Kalke at Synchronicity Theatre
At the reading of a will, attorney Marvin Schwartz expects to get what’s coming to him – as others conspire to keep it from him in this full-length comedy about how the quest for money distorts, emboldens and transforms.
Pictured in Banner: The (virtual and live) 2022 Table Series featuring the cast of ADA’S HUSBAND PASSED by Carlton Molette: (from left) Antonia LaChe’, Addae Moon, Terry Henry, Brian Kurlander, Alexandria Joy, Terrence Smith, Carlton Molette and Enoch King.
Working Title Playwrights 