Karla Jennings
A former newspaper staff reporter, Jennings has been produced in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Off-Off-Broadway. She has had four Off-Off-Broadway productions (one acts), three full-length Atlanta productions, a workshop production in L.A., and showcases and public readings in New York, Atlanta, and Seattle. Her playwriting website's at <http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsJ/jennings-karla.html>.
She received a 2006 Ensemble Studio Theatre Sloan NP2 commission for a play on global warming to be workshopped at The Alliance Theatre. The Magic Theatre granted her a 2006 Sloan rewrite commission for The Ruby Vector, which received the National Arts Club 2005 Playwrights First Award, was accepted in the Lark Theatre Company Playwrights' Week 2005, and was a O'Neill Playwrights Conference 2006 semi-finalist.
She received the biannual Hermann Kesten Fellowship for a July 2006 international writers' conference in Germany for her play Clay's War, and was selected for a highly competitive Hedgebrook writing residency for summer 2007.
Her play 7 Nights at Jay's was a finalist for the Lark's Playwrights' Week 2004 and received artistic associate workshopping there.
Creative Loafing arts weekly rated her play Images in Smoke (Essential Theatre) among Atlanta's top 15 productions in 2000. She received their 2003 People's Choice Award for Best Local Playwright. She co-founded Atlanta's premiere playwrighting organization, Working Title Playwrights, serving for its first three years as Coordinator, presenting ten public readings, a full production of short works, and a new play festival. She now serves on Working Title's Advisory Board. She is also a member of The Dramatists Guild and The Playwrights' Center.
In addition to staff reporting, her freelance work has been published in The New York Times, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, The Japan Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and elsewhere. She 's the author of a book on computer folklore, The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age (W.W .. Norton & Co., 1990) and two unpublished novels.
FULL-LENGTH PLAYS
7 Nights at Jay's
(journeys in ordinary love)(Cast of 7: 4 women and 3 men play various)
Structure: A two-act full-length play in eight scenes.
Set: A few tables and a booth in a bar.
Time: from 1986 to the present.
Synopsis: Desire lures patrons at Jay's Spirit Emporium to unexpected destinations that lead back to each other as the strangers we usually pass by pull us into their lives, and into the hopes, beliefs, and fantasies we use in defense against Time’s irresistible embrace.
Awards: Lark Theatre Company Playwrights' Week 2004 finalist
Clay’s War
(Cast of 8: 5 men and 3 women play various)
Structure: A two-act full-length play in nine scenes.
Set: A cot-like shelf fit in with other shelves, all of which can be draped closed, a table, chairs, wastebasket, filing cabinets, a frame representing a television/"Vid" screen.
Time: the year 2166.
Synopsis: In the year 2166, Atlanta highway department supervisor Clay Eccles fights to survive the final months of America’s second civil war, The Genomics War. Clay is a human clone living in Georgia under Populus Dei dictator Titus Burnstone, who considers human clones and other minorities a contamination of the “right natural” human gene pool and heads “genetic cleansing squads” to murder the genetically “impure,” especially clones. Betrayed by his brother, Clay goes from Populus Dei prisoner to human “chop shop” inmate to resistance fighter in a play exploring the fluidity of identity and the malleability of hate, whose futuristic setting echoes conflicts in Bosnia, Nazi Germany, American slavery, and elsewhere.
Awards: Lark Theatre Company Playwrights' Week 2003 finalist
Demons
(Cast of 8: 4 men and 4 women play various.)
Structure: a two-act full-length play in eight scenes.
Set: All scenes occur in the wilderness of the Great Northwest. Two scenes occur in a cabin, one in a cave, and the rest in the forest or on the trail.
Time: October 31 - November 1,1874.
Synopsis: It’s 1874 near midnight in the Great Northwest, and the spirits are loose. Paul Dunai, a smug 25-year-old priest who converted to Catholicism in rebellion against his minister father, is on a mission to succor the frontier families of the Great Northwest. When he ends up alone and forsaken in the wilderness, he discovers that neither his learning nor his ability can protect him. His faith is challenged by demons who force him to question his belief in himself as a priest, a friend, a man, and a human being. Dunai must find a reason to choose faith against despair, or he’ll become a demon himself.
Dish Babies
(Cast of 6: 3 women and 3 men play various)
Structure: A two-act full-length play in nine scenes.
Set: The set consists of three areas: “office” (chalk board, desk, three chairs), “bedroom” (bed, dresser, rocking chair), and “empty space” (two stage blocks).
Time: the present.
Synopsis: Desperation builds as Megan Bloom and her patient but not quietly suffering husband David ride infertility's exhausting roller coaster. Megan's dreams take stage alongside her reality: her fantasy of perfect children conducting Nobel prize-winning research in the Institute for the Investigation of Just About Anything; a pregnant Greek Chorus singing about pregnancy’s indignities; mad preachers, and studs in black leather jackets. Dish Babies explores primal urges, medical miracles, joy, frustration, acceptance, defiance, and enduring love. It's a play about the borderline between hope and desperation, about birth, the future, personal extinction, and playing the hand that Fate deals you. It’s about obsession and the dreams that drive us, a cry of desire from someone facing oblivion. It's a human experience.
Awards: 1998 Do Gooder New Playwright Award. 1998 Rochester Playwright Festival/Midwest Theatre Network New Play Competition semi-finalist. Workshopped at Two Roads Theater, L.A., Aug./Sept. 2001 pursuant to October Off-Broadway debut postponed due to 9/11.
Images in Smoke
(Cast of 8: 4 men, 4 women.)
Structure: A two-act full-length play in two scenes. 90 minutes without intermission.
Set: An apartment stairwell one hot Atlanta summer night.
Time: The present.
Synopsis: During an Atlanta apartment party one summer night, strangers, friends, and former lovers pit past hopes against present bleak realities. Friendships break, new ones form, illusions crumble and fresh hope is born. The characters discover that the past shapes us, but the truth of our past is impossible to know.
Awards: Essential Theatre Georgia Playwright Winner 2000, the production in Jan.-Feb. 2000 was ranked by Creative Loafing as one of 2000’s top 15 Atlanta productions.
The Ruby Vector
(Cast of 6: 3 men, 3 women.)
Structure: A two-act full-length play in five scenes.
Running time: approximately an hour and forty minutes without intermission.
Set: The nondescript second-floor living room of a federal safe house in Virginia. SL is a door to downstairs. SR is a door to the off-stage bedroom.
Time: A few days after Demyan arrives in the U.S., and a few weeks later.
Synopsis: A clash of wills between two biowarriors determines the fate of thousands as an American bioweapons defense researcher interrogates a former Soviet bioweapons scientist to determine if he’s an unjustly accused defector or a terrorist.
Awards: National Arts Club 2005 Playwrights First Award, Lark Theatre Company Playwrights' Week 2005 participant
Virtually Perfect
(Cast of 7: 3 men and 4 women, or 2 men and 5 women, play various.)
Structure: A two-act full-length play in 17 scenes.
Set: Upstage is a frame large enough for actors to walk through. It represents a computer/video game/television screen and mirror. The spotlight behind the frame is called the “screen light.” The main set is a generic apartment for Toto, Fred/Nicki, and Mimi/Happy. It also serves as a cafe and dance club.
Time: the present.
Synopsis: When we're lost, when reality hurts and illusion pleases, which is more dangerous to desire -- a person or a virtual world? Which is more likely to explode in violence? Virtually Perfect fuses reality with virtual reality in exploring isolation, love, lust, and games -- computer and otherwise.
Awards: honorable mention, 2002 Riva Shiner Full-Length Play Contest.
ONE ACTS
(Please note: Acceleration Nation, Avalanche, and Mother connect together in a comic trilogy that makes for a full-length evening of entertainment.)
Acceleration Nation
(Cast of 6: 3 women and 3 men play various)
Set: The street.
Time: the present.
Synopsis: this non-musical musical ode to the car celebrates the invention that knit our society together while it ripped through our social fabric, shooting sparks of freedom, adventure, personal fulfillment, and environmental and community disintegration.
Avalanche
(Cast of 5: 3 women and 2 men play various)
Set: An office.
Time: the present.
Synopsis: Companies expand and contract explosively in corporate survival's violent universe, shedding employees like chunks of dead matter. This department's final survivors consider paranoa normal, desperately hoping that they won’t be riffed.
Mother
(Cast of 5 or 6: 4 women, 1 or 2 men, depending on the ending used.)
Set: A booth at a Pancake Palace (much like an IHOP).
Time: Tonight, around 11:45 p.m.
Synopsis: While sullenly eschewing Giggly Snigglys at the Pancake Palace with his dangerously affectionate stepmother, young Matthew discovers the disorienting answer to the question, “How many mothers can one boy have?”
The Play's the Thang
(Cast of 7: 5 women and 2 men, or 4 men and 3 women, depending on who plays 2 non-gender-specific roles.)
Set: a stage with a cot for Whitey to expire on.
Time: Tonight, around 10:00 p.m.
Synopsis: A heartwarming reconciliation between a Klanner Dragon and his black dwarf lesbian daughter is ruined by a theatergoer so disgusted with dramatic treacle that she’s ready to spew, joined by a deconstructionist critic whose patronizing praise pisses off the playwright/actor/director’s roommate to the point that they must all die, die die DIE! Except the dwarf, who’s Equity. An enchanting Christmas show for the whole family.
Have also written 21 short pieces - descriptions available upon request.