About AmeriQueer
The AmeriQueer Series is a collection of plays presented as audiocasts exploring the LGBTQ experience within the American identity as a framework for the 2020 election season. These works are insightful, compassionate, and a healing antidote to our politically volatile moment.
Friday, October 16
Thursday, October 29th, 2020
Dear ONE: Love & Longing in Mid-Century Queer America illuminates the lives of ordinary queer Americans as recounted through letters, written between 1953 and 1965, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly LGBTQ periodical in the United States. Looking for love, friendship, or understanding, they wrote of loneliness and yearning, of joy and fulfillment, and of their daily experiences, hidden from history. This epistolary snapshot of mid-century lives captures the radiant diversity of the American queer community as it was discovering itself, and the dawning of a national movement.
Generously Sponsored By
Lillian Faderman and Phyllis Irwin
Cast & Creative Team
George Takei, Diana Burbano, Nicky Endres, JP Karliak, Monique Gaffney
About Lewiston & Clarkston
Lewiston & Clarkston are companion plays focusing on the descendants of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Lewiston and Clarkston explore the LGBTQ point of view within the legacy of America’s westward expansion.Generously Sponsored by Rob Granat & Al Mazur
Friday, October 30th – Thursday, November 12th, 2020
An excavation of the past and how we become who we are, Lewiston focuses on an aging descendant of Lewis who has been selling off her family’s land piecemeal to developers. When an unexpected visitor blasts into her life, she is forced to reckon with family secrets, identity, and her relationship with her homeland.
Lewiston is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. www.concordtheatricals.com
Cast & Creative Team
Marti Gobel – Female Voice
Annie Hinton – Alice
Jyl Kaneshiro – Marnie
Andrew Oswald – Connor
Skyler Sullivan – Stage Directions
Lewiston was developed by Marin Theatre Company, Mill Valley, California. Jasson Minadakis, Artistic Director; Michael Barker, Managing Director; Margot Melcon, Director of New Play Development.
World Premiere Production presented by Long Warf Theatre, April 12, 2016.
Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Joshua Borenstein, Managing Director.
Friday, November 13 – Thursday, November 26, 2020
Clarkston examines our tenuous future by focusing on a young queer descendant of Clark, who, after making the long journey west from his Connecticut home, finds himself stranded in a landscape of chain restaurants and big box stores. As he forms a bond with a local kindred spirit, the truth about life in the great American frontier comes into stark relief.
Cast & Creative Team
Frankie Alicea-Ford – Chris
Lucas Goodman – Jake
Shana Wride – Trisha
Skyler Sullivan – Stage Directions
New York premieres produced by Rattlestick Playwrights.
Theater World Premiere of Clarkston produced by Tallas Theater Center.
Kevin Moriarty, Artistic Director; Jeffrey Woodward, Managing Director.
Developed as part of the 2013 Residency with Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater
About the Playwrights
Josh Irving Gershick’s plays include Dear ONE: Love & Longing in Mid-Century Queer America, Coming Attractions and Bluebonnet Court,winner of the GLAAD Award for Outstanding Los Angeles Theatre. He is writer/director of the film Door Prize, winner of the Alfred C. Kinsey Award, honoring film that furthers understanding of gender or sexuality; and author of two acclaimed oral histories Gay Old Girls,” winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award for LGBT Nonfiction, an American Library Association Book of the Year Nominee, and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist; and Secret Service: Untold Stories of Lesbians in the Military, winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award for LGBT Nonfiction and a C-SPAN Book TV featured title. A former newspaper reporter and editor, he earned an MFA from the USC School of Dramatic Arts & an MPW from the USC Dornsife College. Gershick is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and a U.S. Army veteran.
Samuel D. Hunter’s (Lewiston & Clarkston) plays include The Whale (Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, GLAAD Media Award, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play), A Bright New Boise (Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Few, A Great Wilderness, Rest, Pocatello, Lewiston, Clarkston, and most recently, The Healing and The Harvest. He is the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, a 2012 Whiting Writers Award, the 2013 Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, the 2011 Sky Cooper Prize, the 2008 PONY/Lark Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Idaho. His plays have been produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73, and around the country at such theaters as Seattle Rep, South Coast Rep, Victory Gardens, Williamstown Theater Festival, The Old Globe, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, Marin Theater Company, and elsewhere. His work has been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils, and PlayPenn. A published anthology of his work, including The Whale and A Bright New Boise, is available from TCG books. He is a member of New Dramatists, an Ensemble Playwright at Victory Gardens, a member of Partial Comfort Productions, and was a 2013 Resident Playwright at Arena Stage. A native of northern Idaho, Sam lives in NYC. He holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard.