Shawna Casey
SHAWNA CASEY
https://pwcenter.org/profile/shawna-casey
Shawna Casey is an emerging playwright born of her experience as an award-winning stage actress performing new works by top playwrights in Los Angeles, New York and Europe. Cast in premiere productions of plays by Maria Irene Fornes, Jose Rivera, Murray Mednick, and Bob Glaudini, the process of playwriting got under her skin and found its way to her heart.
In April of 2014, her full-length play NIGHT BECOMES DAY, about a struggling mother’s machinations to hold on to her untamable sons in Culver City, CA, was awarded 2nd place in The Ebell of Los Angeles Playwright Prize competition for women playwrights in California. http://ebellplaywrightprize.com/spotlight-2014-winners/
In November 2014, STRONG FORCE, her two-act look at love, death and romantically-skewed physics through the lens of life in a surreal metropolitan hospital, was chosen out of 500 submissions and given a rousing public reading for a standing room only crowd at the NEWvember Festival in Tivoli, New York.
http://newvemberfestival.com/the-playwrights/2014-playwrights/
THE AEGEAN, her first short play, a romantic comedy about opposites who attract in the starlight on deck of a cruise ship adrift in the Aegean Sea was produced by Padua Hills Playwrights at the Lillian Theater in Hollywood. It was well-received by the public, the Los Angeles Times and LAWEEKLY, and will always hold a special place in her heart.
Other produced short plays include SAP, a screw-ball comedy about a late night encounter between a couple of romantic hopefuls in an old New York apartment, produced by the Lost Studio in Los Angeles, December 2012; BLUEBIRD, an eccentric young woman’s attempt to enlist an unusual favor from her two best friends on New Year’s Day, produced by Theatre of N.O.T.E. in Hollywood, January 2013; ANIMAL STYLE, a comedy about a recently widowed woman who returns home for the holidays to find herself dancing to James Brown’s Sex Machine, produced in December of 2013 at the Lost Studio in Los Angeles; and OUT OF THE BLUE, a romantic revelation in a New York subway car, which premiered at the Acting Barn on November 14, 2014 as part of the first ‘There In 10’ series.
Recent short plays include READ m n WEEP, an unraveling of sibling love and rivalry at a pizza parlor on St. Paddy’s day; and HIS NAME WAS LUKE, featuring midnight confessions of love in a graveyard, which opened February 13, 2015 at the Lost Studios in Los Angeles.
Ms. Casey received her MFA in Playwriting at the Spalding University MFA program in Louisville, Kentucky in 2012. She has written and self-published a book of short stories entitled FEAR NOT, and conceived, edited and contributed to her zine LOVE. Both publications have been carried by Skylight Books in Los Feliz, and Stories Bookstore and Café in Echo Park. Ms. Casey also teaches playwriting to young adults at the Santa Monica based Virginia Avenue Project (www.virginiaavenueproject.org). She lives happily in Los Angeles with her husband Jack Kehler.
