*free* SPECIAL THEATER LAB with guest artists!

Can a story save your life? Does fantasy change your reality? Can your imagination light the way home? In this lab, we'll work in small groups and use everyday objects to devise scenes around ideas, images, sound, light, characters, stories, and text fragments. 

Performers and writers and dreamers: Stretch your creative muscles and work with Mona Z. Smith and Traci Mariano -- two artists who have been devising work together for 25+ years in New York and L.A. No prior experience or preparation or memorization is necessary -- just enthusiasm. Come and play!

TRACI MARIANO is a writer and director. She co-wrote the new play Fire in a Dark House with Mona Z. Smith and directed the premiere at the Whitefire Theatre in L.A. (fall 2018). She has also directed the premieres of Smith’s plays All That Remains, Becoming Something, and Borderlands. Recent directing credits include Lorien Haynes’s Butterside Down (Cherry Lane Theatre/NYC). Past directing work includes: Christopher Kyle’s Boca, Berlin, and This Blessed Knot; American Living Room Festival premieres of Kyle’s La Stigmata and Rachel; Kyle’s adaptations of Hamlet and The Changeling; and Kyle’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. Traci was a Drama League Directing Fellow and directed Wallace Shawn’s Summer Evening at Circle Rep’s Lab. She was assistant director to Marcus Stern on The Treatment (NY Shakespeare Festival) and to Robert Falls on The Night of the Iguana (Goodman). Education: BA in Theatre, Indiana State University; MFA in Directing, Columbia University.

MONA Z. SMITH is a writer, author, and former newspaper reporter. She has collaborated with Traci Mariano for 25+ years. The two co-wrote the play Fire in a Dark House which premiered in fall 2018 at the Whitefire Theatre in L.A., directed by Mariano. The duo also co-conceived All That Remains,a ghost-warrior play about Japanese American soldiers in WWII. Smith wrote the play and Mariano directed the premiere of All That Remains at the Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu; the play and production received multiple awards from the Hawai'i State Theater Association. In her play Becoming Something, Smith explores how pioneering black actor and activist Canada Lee was virtually erased from U.S. history (Kraine Theater/NYC, dir. Mariano). Smith went on to write a critically acclaimed social biography about Lee with the same title (Faber & Faber). Smith's play Borderlands won the national Berilla Kerr Prize; Mariano directed the premiere at SoHo Rep in NYC. That play was later seen at the Rose Theatre (L.A.) and LiveArts (VA). Borderlands was revived in 2016 by Orange Tea Theatre (Amsterdam) as part of an  artist-led effort to raise funds for women refugees. Education: Bachelor of Journalism, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; MFA in Playwriting, Columbia University.