Actor-Playwrights Give Atlanta Extra Dimension
June 07, 2006 by Kathy Janich

ATLANTA — Noël Coward did it, and Sam Shepard and Christopher Durang, on occasion, still do — balance the dual careers of actor and playwright. Three of Atlanta's more prominent and promising artists — Thomas Ward, Lauren Gunderson, and Suehyla El-Attar — are doing the same thing.

The career path of Ward, 29, was almost a foregone conclusion. Growing up in Florence, Ala., and Nashville, Tenn., he routinely attended play rehearsals with his mother, Pat, a high school theatre teacher. His first role was as an angel in a church play; in high school, he played Captain Keller in The Miracle Worker. At Abilene Christian University in Texas, he majored in acting and directing but also took a playwriting class.

Ward's first professional production as a playwright, Keeping Watch, is running at Theatrical Outfit through June 10. The 90-minute play, with parallel stories about an unsettled preacher and a reunion of friends, is about "grief, death, loss, and college angst-ridden stuff," Ward says. It will be among the choices for theatre professionals visiting Atlanta for Theatre Communications Group's national conference, June 8-10.

Reviews have been positive: "Keeping Watch shows insights into Southern life and spiritual dilemmas without resorting to country clichés" (Creative Loafing), and "the play quickly and purposefully transcends the trailer-parky trappings of its environment to offer a poignant comedy-drama" (The Sunday Paper). Still, Ward thinks of himself more as an actor than a playwright. As an MFA graduate of the University of Alabama's professional training program at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, he left the school with professional credits and his Equity card, and appeared in ASF's world premiere of Disguises in 2002 and Georgia Shakespeare's Macbeth in 2004. For the past year, he has worked as audience development coordinator for Theatrical Outfit, where he noticed that the season's final slot was "TBA."

In staff meetings, Ward also noticed that the company's executive artistic director, Tom Key (co-creator of Cotton Patch Gospel), would talk about wanting to produce a world premiere with five characters and a simple set, something that would fit Theatrical Outfit's mission of doing theatre about "the spiritual themes of the American South." Ward eventually gave Keeping Watch to Jill Jane Clements, the company's artistic associate, who passed it on to Key, who decided to stage it. "I was amazed," Ward says. "He didn't talk to me. He didn't come to me with a list of suggestions and revisions. It's the kind of thing I wish for every playwright."

Next for Ward is a dark comedy titled Binge, about a guy looking into gastric bypass surgery. And in a move he calls "very bittersweet," he's leaving Atlanta in July to teach acting at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. The job will allow him to keep writing and acting — ideally, he says, doing Shakespeare in Oregon or Utah.

Dual Nature
Lauren Gunderson, 24, has the résumé of someone much older. The Atlanta-born playwright, actor, screenwriter, and short-story writer has written 14 short or full-length plays and is a 2006 finalist for both the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in California and the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. She has received, among other honors, the Berrilla Kerr Award and the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, and she has been a finalist for the Princess Grace Award and the Heideman Award. Her work has been produced in New York (Parts They Call Deep at Young Playwrights, Sus Manos at Flying Fig Theater) and in Atlanta in association with Theater Emory, the Alliance Theatre's Collision Project, Horizon Theatre Company, Dad's Garage, and Brave New Works.

But Gunderson is also a familiar face on Atlanta's stages, having appeared at Dad's Garage, Aurora Theatre, the Alliance, PushPush Theater, and others. "I have to be on stage for my writing," she says, adding that while she has about "14 projects going," her front-burner list consists of three: a play about a female scientist for Atlanta's French-language Théâtre du Rêve; an adaptation of A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, commissioned by Actor's Express Theatre for its fall education tour; and an adaptation of The Van Gogh Cafe by Cynthia Rylant, commissioned by Synchronicity Performance Group.

"I kind of like the dual nature of it all," Gunderson says. "It can be confusing for both me and sometimes the companies. But I'm pretty ballsy about my ambitions, so it's not going to stop." The 2003 Emory University grad remembers herself as "the mopey one" at high school parties because she always wanted to be off somewhere reading. She counts among her influences Paula Vogel, Lee Blessing, Caryl Churchill, Joe Penhall, Tracy Letts, and Edward Albee. "I don't like the words 'comedy' or 'drama,' " she says, "because things aren't written that way anymore."

Once a week, Gunderson says, she submits her work to a contest, conference, or workshop: "It keeps me writing and in the minds of people that are important out there."

Fearing Mediocrity
"It doesn't feel real," says Suehyla El-Attar, 30, of the world premiere of her play The Perfect Prayer, at Horizon Theatre Company through June 25.

Although an experienced actor — this season she has appeared in Bluish at the Alliance, Synchronicity's Women + War, and Savage Tree Arts Project's Why We Have a Body — El-Attar is new to playwriting. She's also quiet, reflective, and admittedly hard on herself.

A first-generation American born and raised in Mississippi, El-Attar's parents are Egyptian immigrants (two older sisters and the rest of her extended family live in Cairo). Her semiautobiographical The Perfect Prayer — emphasis on semi-, she says — is a comedy-drama about a young Muslim woman in the American South who feels the push-pull of her heritage and her future. The production is the culmination of a two-year process involving readings, workshops, and rewritings, all as part of Horizon's New South Play Festival.

El-Attar majored, alternately, in math, math education, and psychology at Mississippi State University because the school didn't have a theatre major — and her parents didn't want a theatre major in the family. But she found a way to act and, as a student, wrote the beginnings of a play called "Sunset." The assignment got a C, she says, but her teacher encouraged her to keep at it. That play, now full-length, became The Perfect Prayer. While Ward considers himself more in the actor camp and Gunderson sits firmly among playwrights, El-Attar sees herself as both — and sees each as a separate kind of mission.

Now she's working on an untitled piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "You can only be remembered if you're really good or really bad at something," El-Attar says. "My fear is mediocrity."

 

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