Crystal Finn: (Claudine) was seen last summer at The New York International Fringe Festival in Becoming Liv Ullmann, a one-woman play that she wrote. Other New York acting credits include Luther and Five Genocides, Clubbed Thumb; Some Women In Their Thirties Simply Start to Fall by Tina Howe, 59E59 Theaters; What Happened to Bill Viola, Ars Nova; Bird In The Hand, Fulcrum Theater; and Brack’s Last Bachelor Party and Crime and Punishment, 59E59 Theaters. Finn’s regional theatre credits include Two River Theater Company, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Trinity Rep, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Dorset Theatre Festival, Foothill Theatre Company and Brown/Trinity Playwright’s Rep. Finn earned her Master of Fine Arts from Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company. She is a member of Partial Comfort Productions. less was seen last summer at The New York International Fringe Festival in Becoming Liv Ullmann, a one-woman play that she wrote. Other New York acting credits include Luther and Five Genocides, Clubbed Thumb; Some Women In Their Thirties Simply Start to Fall by Tina Howe, 59E59 Theaters; What Happened to... more

Dee Hoty: (Eve) got her start in theatre at Cleveland Play House. She has since earned three Tony Award nominations for starring roles in Footloose, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, and The Will Rogers Follies. She starred on Broadway and in eight major U.S. cities as Donna in Mamma Mia! Additional Broadway credits include Bye Bye Birdie at Roundabout Theatre Company, City of Angels (Outer Critics Circle Nomination), Me and My Girl, Big River, The Five O’Clock Girl and Shakespeare’s Cabaret. Other highlights include playing Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop, tours of 9 to 5 as Violet, Barnum, Doctor Dolittle, Phyllis in Follies (Paper Mill, cast recording), and Kay Thompson in Stormy Weather (Barrymore Award, L.A. Ovation Award nomination). Film and television includes Smash, Elementary, Law & Order(s), the soaps, commercials, voiceovers, recordings and cabaret work. Hoty is a graduate of Otterbein College with an honorary doctorate from same. Proud to be a member of Actors’ Equity Association, she will soon be inducted into CPH’s Hall of Fame. less got her start in theatre at Cleveland Play House. She has since earned three Tony Award nominations for starring roles in Footloose, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, and The Will Rogers Follies. She starred on Broadway and in eight major U.S. cities as Donna in Mamma Mia! Additional Broadway... more

http://www.deehoty.com

Liz Larsen: (Maggie) appeared on Broadway in Hairspray, The Rocky Horror Show, Damn Yankees, Most Happy Fella (Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations, L.A. Drama Logue Award), A Little Night Music (City Opera), Starmites, Smell of the Kill, Fiddler on the Roof, and Annie. Off-Broadway includes A New Brain, Lincoln Center Theatre; Loman Family Picnic and The New Yorkers, Manhattan Theatre Club; Bingo; Little By Little; Him and Her (Fringe Festival Best Actress Award); Such Good Friends and My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (New York Musical Theatre Festival Best Actress Award for both). She has toured nationally in Blues in the Night with Eartha Kitt, Sunday in the Park with George (Helen Hayes Award nomination, Best Featured Actress), and Baby. Film and television include Bridge and Tunnel (2014), Bunheads (ABC Family), recurring roles on Law & Order for 10 seasons and Law & Order: SVU for four; The Sopranos; Exit 19 (with Geena Davis); and My Guys. Web series include Wainy Days, Weiner on Weiner and Submissions Only. less appeared on Broadway in Hairspray, The Rocky Horror Show, Damn Yankees, Most Happy Fella (Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations, L.A. Drama Logue Award), A Little Night Music (City Opera), Starmites, Smell of the Kill, Fiddler on the Roof, and Annie. Off-Broadway includes A New Brain, Lincoln... more

Michael Bloom: (Director) is the eighth artistic director of Cleveland Play House. For CPH he has adapted Emma (published by Samuel French), and directed Bell, Book and Candle; Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (with The Cleveland Orchestra for New Ground Theatre Festival); Ten Chimneys; Lost in Yonkers; Heaven’s My Destination; The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire; Lincolnesque; Rabbit Hole; Well; and Private Lives. He has directed at many of the country’s other major theatres including American Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Old Globe Theatre, South Coast Rep, Seattle Rep, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, Alley Theatre, Alliance Theatre Company, and Long Wharf Theatre. His productions have also been seen throughout Japan. His off-Broadway production of Sight Unseen garnered three Obie Awards, and he received a Drama Desk nomination for direction. Other productions include the American premiere of A Young Lady from Rwanda; Gross Indecency, Elliott Norton Award for Best Directing, 1998; and the world premieres of Dinner with Friends at Actors Theatre of Louisville and Tennessee Williams’ Spring Storm. His articles have appeared in American Theatre Magazine and The New York Times, and his book Thinking Like a Director was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2001. less is the eighth artistic director of Cleveland Play House. For CPH he has adapted Emma (published by Samuel French), and directed Bell, Book and Candle; Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (with The Cleveland Orchestra for New Ground Theatre Festival); Ten Chimneys; Lost in Yonkers; Heaven’s My Destination; The Glass Menagerie;... more

Tony Roach: (Henry) acted in New York at Primary Stages in a workshop of The Men, The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) in You Can’t Take It With You and Separate Tables (Salon Series), Studio 42 in the American premiere of Gaugleprixtown, and Drama League/Fringe in Cop Out. Regional theatre includes Shakespeare Theatre Company, The Liar (world premiere); All’s Well That Ends Well, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and The Imaginary Invalid, Shakespeare & Company; As You Like It and Romeo & Juliet, Portland Stage Company; Marie Antoinette, The Color of Flesh and many others, Kitchen Theatre; Arizona Theatre Company; American Repertory Theatre; Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis; Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park; Alabama Shakespeare Festival; and Vermont Stage Company. Film includes the title role in The Adventures of Buckskin Jack and Miles from Nowhere. He was a guitarist/singer in the Birmingham, Alabama-based band Catalytic. His Bachelor of Arts is from Columbia University; Master of Fine Arts, Harvard University’s ART/MXAT Institute. less acted in New York at Primary Stages in a workshop of The Men, The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) in You Can’t Take It With You and Separate Tables (Salon Series), Studio 42 in the American premiere of Gaugleprixtown, and Drama League/Fringe in Cop Out. Regional theatre includes Shakespeare Theatre Company,... more

Victoria Stewart: (Playwright) was a professional stage manager before graduating from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. Stewart has received the Francesca Primus Prize, a McKnight Advancement Grant, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, a Martha R. Ingram New Works Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship, and she was a finalist for The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She’s been artist-in-residence at Ucross Foundation/Sundance Institute, London’s Donmar Warehouse, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, Tofte Lake Center and Hedgebrook. Rich Girl has had readings at City Theater and Broken Watch and was developed in residence at Tennessee Repertory Theatre. Her plays include Hardball, Summer Play Festival and Live Girls! Theater, named one of the best productions of 2011 by The Seattle Times; 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, Caravan Theatre, Live Girls! Theater, and Workhaus Collective, named one of the top ten productions of 2009 by Citypages; Live Girls, Urban Stages, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and Stage Left; Nightwatches, Overlap Productions; Mercy Watson to the Rescue, Children’s Theatre Company; Leitmotif, The Last Scene; and an adaptation of Henry James’ The Bostonians. She was a collaborator on Fissures (lost and found) presented at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s 2010 Humana Festival. Recently she completed a screenplay for HBO and a bilingual collaborative piece, Clandestino, with Cory Hinkle and The Wilhelm Brothers about the INS raid in Postville, Iowa. She is a producing member of the Workhaus Collective (a collective of Minnesota playwrights producing their own work); a core member of The Playwrights’ Center; and member of Writers Guild of America, West. less was a professional stage manager before graduating from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. Stewart has received the Francesca Primus Prize, a McKnight Advancement Grant, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, a Martha R. Ingram New Works Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship, and she was a finalist for The Susan... more

Playwright Victoria Stewart on New Plays : Our InsideCPH interview is a companion piece to our free InsideCPH events, which give you insight into the people and processes behind the work on our stages. Here, the playwright of Rich Girl discusses the “outrageous fortune” of new plays and their writers.   Can you tell us how you came to playwriting? You started in theatre as a stage manager, right? I was originally a stage manager. That’s what I did professionally for a series of years. Then I had an epiphany. I was working on this really difficult show, and I was touring Europe; it should’ve been the highpoint of my career. And I was like, “Wow. This is such a great job, and yet I’m really unhappy.”  Right around this time my grandfather died and left me a little bit of money—not a ton, but enough to think, “Huh, what do you really want to do?” I’d been writing a lot on the side, but mostly prose. I decided right then and there to write a play and apply to grad school, because finally I had the money to afford it. And that became my life suddenly. And that was fifteen years ago!  Now, fifteen years on, are you starting to find themes or interests that recur in your writing? Where does that impulse come from? The first impulse tends to be a character that I’m interested in. A lot of my plays start around one specific character and the play builds from there—what their environment is, who their friends are, who their lover is, etc. As for thematic things, a lot of times I’m interested—probably again because of my stage management background—in the difference between performance and reality, or just different levels of reality. In Rich Girl I think that’s expressed in how Eve says all this stuff about letting go of money, being very Zen about it, and yet when it comes to the reality of her relationship with her daughter she’s very controlling.  Was the character of Eve the initial impulse for this script? This play actually started a little bit as a joke. (Laughs.) I have two plays that have very strong, commanding, “bitchy” characters. And I have a friend who joked, “You need to write a Bitch Trilogy!” At one point I had watched Suze Orman on some TV show, and she told the story of how she came to do what she does. There aren’t many similarities between the character of Eve and Suze Orman, but definitely she has the same background: she was a waitress who gave all her money to a financial advisor who misadvised her. She lost like $50,000, and then realized, “Oh, I have to take control of my own money.” So I was telling my friend who made the suggestion, and he was like “That’s your third bitch. That’s her!” (Laughs.) I'm also a huge Henry James fan, and so I connected the two. Henry James writes so much about class and money and writes wonderful female characters. When I started writing the play I was lucky enough to have gotten a fellowship from Tennessee Repertory Theatre, to come out there and work on a play. Whatever I wanted to work on. This was also right when the economy was collapsing, and all of a sudden these ideas of money, and the 1% and the 99%, it all really started coming together.  That’s an interesting point to bring up, the importance of that fellowship. For an artist in our country it’s often a fellowship or residency that makes it possible to do your work. Just how do you make a living as a playwright? (Laughs.) That’s a very good question! It’s like how the character of Henry is trying to make a living in the play. You really do patch together a life. You do a little bit of teaching here and there, maybe if you’re lucky you get a residency or commission. You’re constantly swinging from one thing to another hoping for a paycheck to come in. I’ve started to write a little bit for TV which is helping a lot. But I have two children right now, and it is this constant question in your life. How are you going to pay the bills? How are you going to pay for your health insurance? I think that Henry’s anxiety about money is a very truthful thing.  Rich Girl is the centerpiece production of our New Ground Theatre Festival, which, in many ways, is about exposing our audience to the processes that go into developing new work. Several years ago Todd London wrote a book called Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play where he explored the challenges of getting new plays produced, in larger professional theatres especially. Have you had that experience? I feel very lucky to finally have this production. I started working on [Rich Girl] in 2008 and had a pretty full draft at the beginning of 2009. And then you’re just sending it around. It’s had a couple of readings—I’m a core member at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, so it had a reading there, and it had a reading at City Theatre in Pittsburgh. But, you know, I feel immensely lucky because I have plays that have had tons of readings and I could not get a production. Rich Girl is my first major regional production, and I feel pretty blessed. You bring up that point of relationships. What role do relationships play in the life of a playwright and their plays? Relationships can be incredibly important. My first professional production was purely because the director liked the play and brought it to the theatre, Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theatre. I first met David Saint [Artistic Director of George Street Playhouse], who is co-producing Rich Girl, because I had a reading of a previous play at Hartford Stage and met him there. So, definitely relationships matter. Theatre is a collaborative art form. It’s something where you will be in the room with someone for a period of time, so if someone is fun to be in the room with I think it helps. (Laughs.) And if you like being in the room with someone it helps the product.  Let’s talk about those relationships in the rehearsal room. How do actors impact your work? It’s funny, because Michael [Bloom, Rich Girl director and CPH artistic director] has mentioned that some playwrights hate staging rehearsals. I guess because the process is slow, and people are thinking almost mechanically. For me, you can only know if your play works once people are up on stage, walking. As a playwright you’re thinking of structure, you’re thinking of the arc of the entire play, but there is something so amazing about an actor who is only focused on their arc. They can say, “You know, this one line isn’t very active, and the rest of the scene is so active. What can we do?” Or, “Can we cut that line?” It’s amazing, the precision of great actors. So there are just so many ways that actors are invaluable to the process. You can have reading after reading after reading, but it really isn’t until you have bodies in the space that you actually understand your play.  And what about the relationship with a director? I’ve heard it said that the best directors, they get great people in the room then they allow for greatness by getting out of the way. I think Michael’s one of these people, where they have a really amazing eye, they let the actors do what they do best, and then they find ways to shape it. And Michael has been useful in the rewriting. He’ll turn to me when I bring in a new page and say “There’s this one line that doesn’t make sense to me.” And he’s always right! (Laughs.). I think a director brings an outside eye, and you as a playwright and a director are working together on the big picture of what the entire structure is, of what the entire play is saying at the end of the day. You and Michael are in tech rehearsals now at George Street, and start previews in a few days. Has the script changed much in the past several weeks of rehearsal? I haven’t brought in any completely brand new scenes or anything, because the play has had a fairly long process and a lot of readings. And I think since it is somewhat based on a source material it’s not like I’m struggling to find plot. But every day I’m in rehearsal there are tweaks or cuts or line changes. Even in tech, yesterday, I wrote a new opening for the play.  And then, after tech, the final piece of the puzzle comes with the audience… You know, especially when you hear it with an audience—and it is a funny play—if you hear it with an audience and there is something that’s not working, you’re going to want to tweak it. There’s nothing worse than when you have something that’s supposed to be a joke and no one laughs. (Laughs.) So I’m sure, after our first previews, there will be some tweaks even then. Because I do want people to leave the theatre arguing about it, arguing about motives and who’s “right.” I have sympathy for all the characters. I take them all at their word. But I think that’s the wonderful thing about this play in front of an audience: they’re going to have different opinions about what the end of the play means and who’s right and who’s wrong. I’m just really excited to hear an audience, and hear their reactions! less Our InsideCPH interview is a companion piece to our free InsideCPH events, which give you insight into the people and processes behind the work on our stages. Here, the playwright of Rich Girl discusses the “outrageous fortune” of new... more

Play Guide - Rich Girl: To view the Play Guide, click on the related file link below! As an early career theatre artist, I would do a lot to secure funding for my next project. If someone who could write me a blank check walked up to me right now, I would go to the moon and back to get them to hand it over. Money makes the world go round, after all… As much as we like to think that abstract ideas like love and a simple passion for art are enough to make all our dreams—both theatrical and otherwise—come true, money rules our modern times. Therefore, one of the subtle manipulations all young theatre artists learn—artists like the character Henry in Victoria Stewart's new comedy Rich Girl—is how to get someone interested in you and your work. I’ve often found myself wondering whether the people I’m “wooing” perceive me as genuinely passionate, or just resource hungry… People like Eve. In this final play of our season, young Claudine falls head over heels for starving artist Henry, but her mother Eve, a successful financial guru, has her doubts: Is he everything her daughter deserves or is he only after her money? In this Play Guide we’ll discover how Victoria Stewart was influenced by Henry James’ Washington Square and The Heiress, which was adapted from Henry James’ novel. We’ll see if science can tell us whether or not you can actually buy happiness. And we’ll also learn about how a play goes from a nugget of an idea in a playwright’s head, to words on the page, to its first full production. Rich Girl is the centerpiece production of this year’s New Ground Theatre Festival, and you may be surprised to see just how much time and effort (and money!) goes into the creation of new plays such as this one! As the characters in Rich Girl learn, money can change who we are, and who we are to others. We look forward to examining how and why with you, both in the Rich Girl Play Guide, and in the Second Stage Theatre as this insightful new comedy examines women and their relationships with men, mothers and money – and not necessarily in that order.To view the Play Guide, click on the related file link below! less To view the Play Guide, click on the related file link below! As an early career theatre artist, I would do a lot to secure funding for my next project. If someone who could... more