The Playwrights' Unit is a group of experienced, accomplished playwrights from the Cleveland area who receive creative and administrative support from the Cleveland Play House. The Unit meets regularly with Associate Artistic Director Seth Gordon, where they read their works-in-progress and provide each other with feedback. Many of the plays developed in the Playwrights' Unit have been produced by The Cleveland Play House, other Cleveland area theatres, and across the United States. Admission into the Playwrights' Unit is by invitation.

Playwrights’ Unit

Eric Coble
Nina Domingue
Linda Eisenstein
Margaret Lynch
Sandra Perlman
Eric Schmiedl
Michael D Sepesy
Faye Sholiton

Eric Coble 

Eric Coble was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and bred on the Navajo and Ute reservations in New Mexico and Colorado. His plays include “Bright Ideas”, “The Dead Guy”, and “Natural Selection” and have been produced Off-Broadway, throughout the U.S., and on several continents, including productions at Manhattan Class Company, The Kennedy Center, Playwrights Horizons, Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, Alliance Theatre, The Cleveland Play House, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Laguna Playhouse, Stages Repertory, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival.

Awards include the AT&T Onstage Award, National Theatre Conference Playwriting Award, an NEA Playwright in Residence Grant, a TCG Extended Collaboration Grant, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants.

Eric is a member of the Cleveland Play House Playwrights Unit, as well as a writer for several nationally broadcast radio programs, and currently has three screenplays in the labyrinth of Hollywood.

Nina Domingue

Nina Domingue credits at The Cleveland Play House include Wade in the Water, Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest, The Emperor’s Nightingale, and The Servant of Two Masters  Other Cleveland productions include Blues for an Alabama Sky, The Shadow Box, and For Colored Girls at Karamu House; Sincerity Forever, Convergence Continuum; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Venus, Mo Pas Connin, Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge, and Nickel and Dimed at Cleveland Public Theater; and To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Merry Wives of Windsor, You Can’t Take it With You, Amadeus, and As You Like It at Great Lakes Theatre Festival  Her Off-Broadway work includes It Hasn’t Always Been This Way at New Federal Theater and The Castillo Theater  Regionally she been with Tulane Summer Shakespeare Festival  Her film work includes Eve’s Bayou and Progressions  Ms. Domingue received her MFA in Acting from West Virginia University.  She earned her BA in Acting at Dillard University of New Orleans, and she’s trained at Mountview Conservatory for the Arts, London.

Linda Eisenstein  / www.lindaeisenstein.com

Linda Eisenstein’s plays and musicals have been produced in 26 US states, and in England, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the Philippines. She is a three-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Playwriting Fellowships for Three the Hard Way and her musicals Star Wares: The Next Generation and Discordia. Other prizes include the Gilmore Creek Award (Three the Hard Way), Sappho’s Symposium (The Names of the Beast), West Coast Ten-Minute Play Competition (A Rustle of Wings) and an All-England Theatre Festival Prize (Marla’s Devotion). She has been a finalist for the Jane Chambers competition (Rehearsing Cyrano), the Heideman Award (Higher), the Midwest Play Competition (The Las tRed Wagon Tent Show in the Land), and a New York Innovative Theatre Award (Eisenstein’s Monster). Her musicals have been developed by the Cleveland Play House, Cleveland Public Theatre, Chicago Musical Theatre Works, ASCAP/Disney (Chicago), and the Kennedy Center; her short plays and monologues have been widely anthologized. Besides the Playwrights’ Unit, Linda is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc., ASCAP, Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas, and the International Centre for Women Playwrights.

Margaret Lynch 

Margaret Lynch has been a member of the Playwrights Unit of the Cleveland Play House since 1996. In 2005, she was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship on the basis of a play (The Measure of Men). Her first play, Crossroads Dancing, was directed by Caroline Jackson Smith and produced at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio, in January 2000. Her second play, The Heart Rising, received a staged reading at Dobama Theatre in June 2002, as winner of the Owen Kelly Adopt-a-Playwright Award. Ms. Lynch’s plays and adaptations have been performed by the Great Lakes Theater Festival, The Cleveland Play House, and the Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theatre.

Ms. Lynch is the founder and producing director of Pathway Productions, a theater ensemble that creates theatrical presentations for educational purposes, and through that Ms. Lynch has written and directed more than twenty-five scripts about workplace issues since 1994. She has also adapted and directed touring productions of folk tales for young audiences. She is also co-founder and co-director of the Cleveland Theater Collective, a service organization whose mission is to provide support services for professional theater in northeast Ohio.

She has also served as dramaturg for Great Lakes Theater Festival from 1983-2003, and is a past president of the Irish American Archives Society.

Sandra Perlman / www.sperlman.com

Sandra Perlman is an award-winning member of The Cleveland Play House Plawrights’ Unit. Her most recent play, Lunacy, was developed during the Play House Next Stage Festival of New Plays in 2006 and had its world premier at the Dobama Theatre as part of the 2007 FusionFest at the Play House. Sandra is a recipient of three Ohio Arts Council fellowships in playwriting. In Search of Red River was a finalist at the O’Neill and had its world premiere at the New Jersey Repertory in 2000. Cliff Diving had a reading at the Manhattan Theatre Club and was produced by Dobama Theatre in 1988. Swann was chosen for the Cleveland Play House Next Stage Festival in 2005, and won a grant in 2006.

Perlman was commissioned by the Ohio Arts Council/Ohio Humanities Joint Program to write Dear Mother and All based on the WWI letters of an Ohio family. Nightwalking, inspired by the Kent State May 4th Oral history project she founded in 1990, premiered at Chicago’s Terrapin Theatre. The Cleveland Play House offered Jocasta as part of The Next Stage Festival in 2001 and Perlman was nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association’s M. Elizabeth Osborn Award for Emerging Playwright.

Ms. Perlman has worked as a producer for PBS 45/49 and Director of Public Relations at NPR 89.7 WKSU-FM. She has given many workshops and most recently taught playwriting at Case Western.

Eric Schmiedl 

Eric Schmiedl is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of Kent State University and the University of Hawai’i. His plays have been produced by The Cleveland Play House, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, TheatreVirginia, the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, BackStage Theatre in Chicago, Karamu House, Theatre at Lime Kiln, and the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. This season The Cleveland Play House premiered Eric’s adaptation of Jungle Book, and the Oregon Children’s Theatre will produce Eric’s hip-hop inspired version of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. His acclaimed adaptation of Lee Smith’s remarkable novel Fair and Tender Ladies will also receive its third production at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival this year. He is currently working on commissions for the Denver Center Theatre Company and the Oregon Children’s Theatre. As a director, Eric recently worked on Night Bloomers for Dobama Theatre and Let Freedom Ring for Ensemble Theatre. Eric is a member of The Cleveland Play House’s Playwrights’ Unit and is on the faculty of the MFA in Writing program at Spalding University. He is also the recipient of the Lisa Toishigawa Inoye Playwriting Award.

Michael D Sepesy 

Michael D. Sepesy holds a B.A. in English and Art from Cleveland State University as well as a certificate in graphic design. His plays have been seen at Cleveland Public Theatre (Reinfield, A Devil in the Head), Detroit Avenue Arts (Holiday Hotline), and the New York International Fringe Festival (Loserville). His play Lady Justice received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship and won the Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition. His work has been published in Angle Magazine, Whiskey Island Quarterly, The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 1998 (Smith & Kraus), and Cleveland in Prose and Poetry (League Books).

Faye Sholiton 

Faye Sholiton is a member of the Playwrights’ Unit at The Cleveland Play House, where she has developed her work since 1996. A three-time winner of Individual Artist Grants from the Ohio Arts Council and dozens of other prizes, she has seen her work performed or read all over the U.S. and in London. Smith & Kraus and Meriwether have published scenes from her plays.

Among her full-length works are The Interview, The Good Times, A Form of Hope, Telling Lives, V-E Day, and All Things Being Equal. She is currently adapting Fugitive Candidate, the Autobiography of Howard Mechanic, the Last Prisoner of the Vietnam War.

A longtime journalist, Sholiton is theater writer for Northern Ohio Live Magazine. Memberships include the Dramatists’ Guild, the International Centre for Women Playwrights, and Cleveland Theatre Collective. She teaches playwriting, including “Playwrights at Sea” workshops for the Crystal Curise line.