Goodman Theatre

Regina Taylor's (Rain) most recent play, Magnolia, premiered in the Goodman's 2008/2009 season, directed by Anna D. Shapiro (Tony Award Winner for August: Osage County). Her play, The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove premiered at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and was produced at the Goodman in June 2006 with Taylor directing. Drowning Crow, her adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, was produced on Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club's Biltmore Theater. Taylor wrote the award-winning Crowns, which was first produced at the McCarter Theatre and at Second Stage in New York, and has become the most performed musical in America; Taylor also directed the production to critical acclaim.

Taylor's other plays include Oo-Bla-Dee, which premiered at the Goodman and which won the 2000 American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award; Escape From Paradise, a one-woman show; Watermelon Rinds; Inside the Belly of the Beast; Mudtracks; Love Poem #97; and she curated Urban Zulu Mambo, an evening of plays by Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks and Kia Corthron.

Taylor 's acting credits include roles on Broadway, off-Broadway and in numerous resident theaters. Her film credits include Clockers, Losing Isaiah, Lean on Me, A Family Thing, Courage Under Fire, with Denzel Washington and The Negotiator with Samuel L. Jackson. For her role as Lilly Harper on the television series I'll Fly Away, Taylor won an NAACP Image Award, was nominated for an Emmy Award and received the Golden Globe Award for Best Leading Dramatic Actress. She appeared as Cora in Cora Unashamed in PBS's Masterpiece Theater American Collection. She was seen on CBS's The Education of Max Bickford as Judith Bryant. Her additional television credits include the CBS series FEDS, Law & Order, Crisis at Central High, The Howard Beach Story, Children of the Dust with Sidney Poitier, and Strange Justice, a Showtime original film in which she portrayed Anita Hill (Peabody Award, Gracie Award). Most recently she portrayed Molly on CBS's The Unit written and produced by David Mamet and Shawn Ryan (2008 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama).

Photo by Eric Williams.

Nilo Cruz (The Color of Desire) is a Cuban-American playwright whose work has been produced widely around the United States and Europe. His plays include Night Train to Bolina, Dancing on her Knees, A Park in Our House, Two Sisters and a Piano, A Bicycle Country, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, Lorca in a Green Dress, Anna in the Tropics, Beauty of the Father and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and translations of Lorca's Dona Rosita the Spinster, The House of Bernarda Alba and Life Is A Dream. He is currently writing the book for the musical HAVANA! with music by Frank Wildhorn and a screenplay about Alina, daughter of Fidel Castro. Cruz has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, San Francisco's W. Alton Jones award and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award. His work has been seen at the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey, at New York's Shakespeare Festival's Public Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club and Repertorio Espanol, at South Coast Rep, at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, New York Theatre Workshop, Magic Theatre, Minneapolis Children's Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Washington's Studio Theatre and Florida Stage. Internationally, his plays have been produced in London at Hamstead Theatre and The Finborough and RADA and in cities throughout Spain including Madrid and Seville. In 2003 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics and in 2009 he won The Laura Pels Mid-career Playwrighting Award.

Courtesy of Goodman Theatre.

Kia Corthron's Bugs of the Pigs in the Lions was commissioned by the Playwrights Center through its McKnight National Residency. It was further supported by The Institute/Goodman Theatre Fellowship co-sponsored by the Goodman and Columbia College Chicago's Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media. A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick will premiere at Playwrights Horizons in March 2010. Last spring Trickle was part of Ensemble Studio Theatre's One-Act Marathon. Other plays include Moot the Messenger (Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival), Light Raise the Roof (New York Theatre Workshop), Snapshot Silhouette (Minneapolis' Children's Theatre), Slide Glide the Slippery Slope (ATL Humana, Mark Taper Forum), The Venus de Milo Is Armed (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), Breath, Boom (London's Royal Court Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre), Force Continuum (Atlantic Theater Company), Splash Hatch on the E Going Down (New York Stage and Film, Baltimore's Center Stage, Yale Repertory, London's Donmar Warehouse), Seeking the Genesis (Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club), Digging Eleven (Hartford Stage Company), Life by Asphyxiation (Playwrights Horizons), Wake Up Lou Riser (Delaware Theatre Company), Come Down Burning (American Place Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre), Cage Rhythm (Sightlines/The Point in the Bronx). Awards include the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Creative Arts Residency (Italy), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts, AT&T On Stage Award, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, Mark Taper Forum's Fadiman Award, National Endowment for the Arts/TCG, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Callaway Award, Connections Contest winner, and in television a Writers Guild Outstanding Drama Series Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Wire. Corthron is currently a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and of the Writers Guild of America, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Courtesy of Goodman Theatre.

Carlyle Brown (Dartmoor Prison) is a writer/performer and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company based in Minneapolis, which has produced The Masks of Othello: A Theatrical Essay, The Fula From America: An African Journey, and Talking Masks. His plays include The African Company Presents Richard III, The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, Buffalo Hair, The Beggars' Strike, The Negro of Peter the Great, Pure Confidence, A Big Blue Nail and others. He has received commissions from Arena Stage, Houston Grand Opera, Children's Theatre Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Goodman Theater, Miami University of Ohio and University of Louisville. He is the recipient of playwriting fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, Theatre Communications Group and the Pew Charitable Trust. Brown has been artist-in-residence at New York University School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, The James Thurber House in Columbus, and Ohio State University Theater Department where he directed his music drama, Yellow Moon Rising. He has been a teacher of expository writing at New York University; African-American literature at the University of Minnesota; playwriting at Ohio State University and Antioch College; African American theater and dramatic literature at Carlton College as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Artist, and "Creation and Collaboration" at the University of Minnesota Theater Department. He has worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant for the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage in Louisville. Brown is a core member at Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and he is an alumnus of New Dramatists in New York and a member of the Dramatists Guild. He is on the board of directors of The Playwrights' Center and Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the non-profit professional theater and the Jerome Foundation. He is a member of the Charleston Jazz Initiative Circle at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina where his works and papers are archived. He is the 2006 recipient of The Black Theatre Network's Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.

Courtesy of Goodman Theatre.

Rohina Malik (Yasmina's Necklace) is a Chicago based playwright, actress and Solo Artist. She was born and raised in London, England, and draws upon her South Asian heritage to inspire her work. Malik's highly-acclaimed one-woman play Unveiled had its world premiere at 16th Street Theater, where she performed to sold out houses. Unveiled will return to Chicago in March 2010 at the Victory Gardens Theater. Malik has worked with Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and Live Bait Theater. Her new play Yasmina's Necklace, was workshopped in August 2009 with Teatro Vista, Theater with a View.

Courtesy of Goodman Theatre.

Thomas Bradshaw's (Mary) newest play, The Bereaved, premiered in New York in September 2009 at Wild Project. In 2008, two of his plays were premiered: Southern Promises, at Performance Space 122 in September; and Dawn, at The Flea Theater in November. Both were listed among the Best Performances of Stage and Screen for 2008 in The New Yorker. His play entitled Purity was produced at Performance Space 122 in January 2007, and Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist and Cleansed were produced on a double bill at The Brick Theatre in February of that year. Strom was also produced in Los Angeles in the spring of 2008.

Bradshaw received his M.F.A. from, and is an Assistant Professor, at Medgar Evers College. He has been featured as one of Time Out New York's ten playwrights to watch and Best Provocative Playwright by the Village Voice. Currently he is a Fellow at The Lark Play Development Center as well as the 2008/2009 Streslin Fellow at Soho Rep, where he has been working on his adaptation of the book of Job, which was workshopped at Stanford and Berkeley Rep in spring 2009. He was a Fellow at New York Theater Workshop in 2006/07 and is now a Usual Suspect.

Bradshaw is currently under commission from Goodman Theater, The Flea Theater, Theater Bielefeld (Germany), and Partial Comfort Productions. During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, he will be working in England and Germany on his new play about Queen Charlotte.

Courtesy of Goodman Theatre.