University of Iowa

Jennifer Fawcett

Jennifer (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop) is a playwright, fiction writer, and founding member of Working Group Theatre. Her plays have been developed and produced at theaters across the country, including at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (CA), Phoenix Theatre (IN), Urbanite Theatre (FL), Tennessee Women Playwrights Theatre, Centenary Stage Company (NJ), Available Light Theatre (OH), the Source Festival (DC) Palm Beach Dramaworks (FL), and Hancher and Riverside Theatre in Iowa City, among others. She is the recipient of the NEFA National Theatre Award (with Working Group Theatre) for her two-play project, Out of Bounds, the Kennedy Center’s National Science Playwriting Award for Atlas of Mud, and she was nominated for the ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award for Birth Witches. Her newest play, Apples in Winter, which won the NNPN Smith Prize for Political Theatre and the Susan Glaspell Award, is currently having six productions across the country. An expat Canadian, she made theatre for many years in Toronto before crossing the border. Visit Jennifer online at www.jenniferfawcett.org.

Instructor Events

Writing around the Edges

Weekend July 13 to July 14 2019
Instructor(s): 
Jennifer Fawcett

Have you heard the anecdote about the writer who wrote 900 pages and then was ready to start her book? Extreme as that may seem, the point is that sometimes the best way to develop your story is to write around the edges of it, to discover the world around the plot, the history of characters, the provenance of an object. In other words, sometimes you have to write a lot that won’t go directly on the page but will flavor everything else that does.

A Play in a Week: The Building Blocks of Playwriting

Weeklong July 14 to July 19 2019
Instructor(s): 
Jennifer Fawcett

Words and actions, these are the fundamental building blocks of plays. Subtext, motivation, desire, emotion, humor, suspense… How do you communicate these if you don’t have those long descriptive paragraphs where a character remembers her childhood or anticipates the end of his relationship? (Sure, you can put in lots of stage directions but no one reads those.) Hint: you communicate all of this and more through what your characters SAY and what they DO. The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence. And that’s essential too.

Solo Performance 101

Weekend July 20 to July 21 2019
Instructor(s): 
Jennifer Fawcett

One voice telling one story. The one-person play harkens back to the storyteller spinning a tale around the campfire. It can be fiction or nonfiction, it can have one character or many (yes, you can have dialogue in a solo performance), it can involve projections and props and pyrotechnics, or it can just be one person standing on a bare stage asking the audience to come with them on a journey. No matter what form it takes, a play for one is a unique piece of theatrical magic for the actor, the audience and the writer.