Karen Page receives Essential award for play

Karen Page recently received first place for her comedy, “Speaking Nazi,” in the Essential Theatres annual play contest for Georgia playwrights.

After receiving such a prestigious award, the play was presented at Georgia College & State University as a studio production in connection with the Arts and Letters Festival.

“Speaking Nazi” wasn’t always a first place winner. It was in 2001 that theatre student Karen Page first came up with the play. The play was first written as a one-act play, and then submitted to the Region IV Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, where it won second place.

“I took that play and basically flushed it out and added a little bit of crazy surrealism,” said Page.

“Speaking Nazi” is about a family who believes that all kinds of things will occur after Y2., They believe that at the turn of Y2K the Nazis will attack them. Their son, David, has just returned from his first year of college, and he is frowned upon for taking classes in German. The
parents plan to take the entire family into some underground cellar so
that they will all be safe.

The irony is that the audience already knows that nothing will happen in the end, so the whole thing is absolutely hilarious. Page was reluctant about submitting the comedy, but after a little encouragement from her friends she sent it in.

The Essential Theatre required that all entries be full-length plays in any genre using only a small cast of no more than 10 people. After a long period of waiting, Page got the call telling her that her comedy had won first place.

“This award will definitely be on my resume for life!” said Page. “They told me that there will be about 10-14 performances, Honestly I would have been happy if they would have performed it just once, so this is awesome.”

Auditioning begins at the end of October, and the play goes live in January of 2003 at the PushPush Theatre. Peter Hardy, founder of the Essential Theatre in Atlanta, will be introducing Page to the audience at the opening performance, and he will present her with an award.

Page hopes to continue writing plays, but she will settle for just about anything that has to do with theatre. She plans to audition at conferences like the Southeastern Theatre Conference this year and hopefully someone will appreciate her talent and pull her on board.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 13 2002. Filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry