Playwright Michael Bettencourt

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News

Columnist

I write a monthly on-line column for the theatre magazine Scene4. (The link will open a new window.) I have also collected all the essays into a PDF version for your reading pleasure.

Recent columns:

Productions/Readings/Awards

Of Recent Vintage

May 30-June 15, 2008: Premiere of Hardball by Playwrights Forum of Memphis, TN. Directed by Jonathan Adam Ross.
March 27-April 12, 2008: "Biog," a new short play in Buffalo Quickies, produced by Alleyway Theatre.
January 14-27, 2008: A production of "Making Light: The Found Letters of Hester Prynne", as part of Metropolitan Theatre's Hawthornucopia
April 13-16, 2007: A production by the New Hampshire Theatre Project's Junior Repertory Company of Macbeth's Children.
January 2007: An adaptation of Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg as part of the Metropolitan Theatre's "Twainathon."
Two plays in the Gallery Players’ June 2006 play festival, Black Box: Location: Highway. Time: Dusk and No Great Loss
Undress Me was selected for production by Theatre Limina in Minneapolis, MN, for their Summer Shorts festival, “Double Vision. ” The script was produced not just once, but twice -- with different directors, casts, and artistic interpretations. These productions were performed back-to-back in June 2006.
April 3, 2006: Reading of Truces/Treguas by Ten Grand and a Burger Productions, as part of their Cold Cuts Reading Series.
March 28, 2006: Production of Equal. Separate. in Another Country Production’s SLAMBoston short-play festival. Directed by Lau Lapides.
November 2005: Ain’t Ethiopia won third place in the FilmMakers International Screenwriting Awards (2005). Part of the winning package was a trip to the Screenwriters Expo 4 in Los Angeles (see the essay Screen-Play: My Sojourn at the Screenwriters Expo 4. There is also an interview with the screenwriter. (The interview can also be found on this website.)
June 16 - July 2, 2005: Production of A Question of Color by Playwrights’ Forum, Memphis TN. This production of A Question of Color won an Ostrander for Best Original Script at the city’s annual award ceremony. The play also won a Silver Medal in the 2005 Pinter Review Prize for Drama.
June 2005: Two plays in the Gallery Players’ summer festival, Black Box: Only The Dead Know Brooklyn (June 2 - 5) and Sporting Goods (June 9 - 12). Go to reviews.
January 24, 2005: Reading of A Question of Color by New Jersey Rep, directed by Gail Winar.

Check These Out

New scripts: Hardball, a full-length play about a Jewish baseball pitcher, and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, an adaptation of Mark Twain's short story done for Metropolitan Playhouse.
Interview by The Brooklyn Papers for the Gallery Players Black Box Festival 2005.
Five full-length screenplays, eight short screenplays -- see the descriptions page.
Under short plays check out Only The Dead Know Brooklyn, The Adulterous Woman (based on the story by Albert Camus), Location: Highway. Time: Near Dusk (when Adam finds the seventh dead deer on the highway), If Cleanliness (which blends water, St. Brigid, and Emma Goldman into one fluid 20-minute piece), and The Bête Goes Noire (in which Charon the Boatman has found a new occupation.
Two full-length plays: In The Name Of (about an America just past the present day, when all proposals for terrorist prevention contained in the USA-Patriot Act and Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 have become standard practice), and Esquina (concerning the death of 17-year old Jose Ives).
Two one-act plays: The First Day of the Seventh Month (in which a man who has given himself six months to live wakes up on the morning of the first day of the seventh month) and Let Down the Rains (where a youngish talk-show therapist falls for a geezer cab driver - really!)
In the Children’s section, under Teenagers, is No More Prisons. Clique (a.k.a. Cassandra), a young woman, is on a quest. She has been tagging every available surface with the phrase “No More Prisons.” On one of her “outings,” she is found by QT, a counselor working with at-risk youth, who has been looking for her to ask her questions about what she is doing and to offer her help. Clique’s story unfolds the life of her sister, Johanna, imprisoned for a murder she committed at the age of seventeen.