Description

The Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition: Every year the Alliance Theatre selects five new plays by emerging playwrights and does readings of their new works. The winning play also gets a fully staged production on the Hertz Stage. This is a very popular program and over the last few years has built up a strong following among the public.

Starting this fall the Alliance Theatre Acting Program's Fall Players will also produce two of these brand new plays; a new collaboration with the Alliance Theatre's highly popular Kendeda Festival.

Josh Tobiessen’s Spoon Lake Blues: In an attempt to save their family home from a constant barrage of debt collectors, two brothers, Denis and Brady, start robbing the homes of their rich neighbors in the quickly gentrifying mountain town of Spoon Lake. Everything is going according to plan until Brady develops a crush on Caitlin, a young African American college student whose wealthy family Denis and Brady robbed the day before. While Caitlin immediately takes pity on the brothers' dire situation her attempts to help out the locals end up causing problems of their own.

Josh Tobiessen’s Election Day: It's Election Day, and Adam knows his over-zealous girlfriend will never forgive him if he fails to vote. But when his sex starved sister, an eco-terrorist, and a mayoral candidate willing to do anything for a vote all show up, Adam finds that making that quick trip to the polls might be harder than he thought. Election Day is a hilarious dark comedy about the price of political (and personal) campaigns.

Josh Tobiessen is a 2006-2007 Finalist for his play Election Day. Originally from Schenectady, New York, Josh received a degree in Philosophy from Grinnell College in Iowa before moving to Chicago to find fame and fortune as an actor. It wasn’t there, so in 2000 Josh moved to Galway, Ireland, where he co-founded a theatre company named Catastrophe that produced his plays at such venues as the Galway Arts Festival and The Dublin Fringe Festival. At the time of the competition, Josh was a student at University of California, San Diego’s M.F.A. Playwriting program.

Cast of Spoon Lake Blues

Cast of Election Day

Stage Crew

Time & Place

Company: Alliance Theatre Acting Program's Fall Players

Venue: Alliance Theatre's Black Box

Biography