John Cariani - is an actor and a playwright. He grew up in rural northern Maine and attended Amherst College where he majored in history, with a concentration in Black Studies. He planned to be a history teacher, but a last-minute detour landed him an acting internship at a regional theater, and he became an actor. John has spent his career performing in plays and musicals on and off-Broadway and at regional theaters across the country. He has been nominated for a Tony Award, two Grammy Awards, and has won an Outer Critics Circle Award. Well known for his film and TV work, John has had recurring roles on television shows like Law & Order and Numb3rs, and he has shared the big screen with Christopher Walken, Gina Rodriguez, and Robert de Niro. As a playwright, John is best known for his first play, Almost, Maine, which has become one of the most popular plays in the world. It has received nearly 6000 productions to date and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Over the past decade, it has become the most frequently produced play in high schools, outpacing classics like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Our Town. John’s other plays have been produced over 500 times around the world and have been translated into several languages. As an artist, John is passionate about making room for the people who made him what he is: rural Americans. Rural Americans are woefully underrepresented in contemporary theater. When they do appear on stage, they are portrayed as sad, addicted, and uneducated people. But they are so much more than that. John’s newest plays explore the hopeful, joyful parts of hardscrabble lives. And they take a loving look at what it is to grow up queer—like he did—in rural America.

Bess Welden - is a theater maker living and creating in her adopted home state of Maine. She spent 2022 as a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow for her work at the intersection of art-making and social change. She served as the 2024 Playwright-In-Residence for the Maine Playwrights Festival and recently created a commission for the Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated project, an interdisciplinary visual art, music, and theater exhibition honoring girls and young women who died in the Holocaust. She is the Founder/Core Artist of Death Wings Project (www.deathwingsproject.org).

Bess’ play Madeleines won the 2022 National Jewish Playwriting Contest and was a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Madeleines has been developed in New York City with Jewish Plays Project, in Palo Alto with TheaterWorks Silicon Valley, in Indiana with the Jewish Theatre of Bloomington, in West Hartford, CT with Playhouse on Park, and with Portland Stage as part of the Little Festival of the Unexpected. Madeleines will make its world premiere at Portland Stage in 2025.

Her play with songs, Death Wings, won the 2020 Maine State prize of the Clauder Competition for New England Playwrights and was produced in Maine by Dramatic Repertory Company, The Theater Project, and Meetinghouse Arts with major support from the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission. Death Wings was a 2020 semi-finalist for the prestigious O’Neill New Play Conference and was workshopped with Fresh Ink Theatre at Boston Center for the Arts.

Her play Refuge Malja, winner of the Tel Aviv Jewish Plays Contest and a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Playwriting Contest, premiered on Portland Stage’s mainstage. Refuge Malja and Madeleines were both nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Monologues from Death Wings and Madeleines are featured in The 2021 and 2024 Best Stage Monologues for Women published by Smith & Kraus.

Her short plays Celebrity Exit and All I Ever Wanted Was to Play were produced by Colby College’s Department of Performance, Theater, Dance. Mergirl Saves the Waves, Bess’ feminist, environmentalist adaptation of The Little Mermaid, was developed with support from the Maine Arts Commission and staged by A Company of Girls at the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine. Her solo comedies The Passion of the Hausfrau and Big Mouth Thunder Thighs premiered in Portland Stage’s Studio Theater, and her collaborative theater performance project with live music and illustration, Legbala is a River, premiered at Mayo Street Arts. She participated as an invited writer at the National Winter Playwrights Retreat (HBMG Foundation) and with Company One Theatre’s PlayLab Unit in Boston. You can hear her 15-minute audio rom-coms “What I Miss Most,” “Under My Skin,” “Island Time” on the Meet Cute Podcast (www.meetcute.com).

Steven Dietz - His forty-plus plays and adaptations have been seen at over one hundred regional theaters, as well as Off-Broadway and in twenty-five countries internationally. Dietz has been named one of the “20 Most-Produced Playwrights in America” by American Theatre Magazine on multiple occasions. Recent premieres include Gaslight, adapted from Patrick Hamilton; Murder on the Links, adapted from Agatha Christie; and the serio-comic thriller, How a Boy Falls (Joseph Jefferson nomination for Best New Play). Dietz’s widely-produced play, Shooting Star, was adapted into the Meg Ryan movie, “What Happens Later” by Dietz, Ryan, and Kirk Lynn. Awards include the American Theatre Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Citation for Bloomsday; Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award for Fiction and Still Life with Iris; PEN USA Award in Drama for Lonely Planet; and an Edgar Award® from the Mystery Writers of America for Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure. Dietz taught in the MFA Playwriting and Directing program at UT/Austin for twelve years, and continues to regularly conduct master classes in playwriting, directing, story-making, and collaboration across the US. Dietz and his wife, playwright Allison Gregory, divide their time between Seattle and Austin.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) - was a Danish writer, poet, and playwright, best known as the author of some of the world’s most widely read fairytales. Born into poverty in Odense, Denmark, Andersen began his career as an aspiring actor, but turned to writing while at the University of Copenhagen. Although he first achieved literary recognition in the 1830s for his plays and novels, it was his fairytales that eventually made him an international literary figure. Andersen was an innovator in children’s fiction, writing most of his tales in a spoken rather than literary idiom, and depicting suffering and unhappy endings while still staying connected to a child’s perspective. Among the best-known of his over 150 children’s stories are The Princess and the Pea (1835), The Little Mermaid (1836), The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837), The Ugly Duckling (1844), and The Little Match Girl (1848). Andersen’s story The Snow Queen (Sneedronningen, in Danish) was first published in 1845 in his fourth collection of Eventyr (or Tales). One of Andersen’s longest stories, it is also regarded by some critics as his masterpiece, and has remained one of his most popular tales over the years.

Tony Kushner - Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Tony Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, Or Change, the musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and her Children, and the English-language libretto for the children’s opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels in America and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. In 2012 he wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s movie Lincoln. His books include But the Giraffe: A Curtain Raising and Brundibar: The Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. His recent work includes a collection of one-act plays entitled Tiny Kushner, and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, and the 2012 National Medal of Arts, among many others. In September 2008, Tony Kushner became the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the largest theater award in the US. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

Joe DiPietro - Won two Tony Awards, a Drama Desk Award and 2 Outer Critics Circle Awards. Joe is presently at work on Sinatra (Universal Music Group Theatrical and Frank Sinatra Enterprises) premiering at The UK’s Birmingham Rep in Aug ‘23, Babbitt (starring Matthew Broderick) opening at The La Jolla Playhouse in Fall ’23, F*cking Men opening at London’s Waterloo East Theatre in Spring ’23, and Obsessed, The Story of Diane Warren...So Far. Broadway: Diana, Nice Work If You Can Get It (Tony nominations include Best Musical & Best Book; Drama Desk Award - Best Book), Memphis (Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score) All Shook Up, Living on Love. Off-Broadway: Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, Clever Little Lies, The Toxic Avenger, The Thing About Men, Over the River and Through the Woods and the record-breaking I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. Recent regional credits include The Second Mrs. Wilson (Long Wharf Theatre and George Street Playhouse,) Fucking Men (London's longest running fringe show), Chasing the Song, the epic play Hollywood.

Margaret Chase Smith tba

Senator Joe McCarthy tba

William Lewis, Jr. tba

Jean Kerr tba

* Member, Actors' Equity Association

** Member, United Scenic Artists

Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields

Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields met while training at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). All core members of Mischief Theatre, they had already worked in comedy together for several years before they started out as a writing team. The three’s first piece was The Play That Goes Wrong (winner – Best New Comedy – Olivier Awards and What’s On Stage Awards). The show started out on the London and Edinburgh fringe before touring the UK and internationally and then returning to the West End in September 2014, where it is still running. It's also playing on Broadway and headed out on a US tour in 2018 and has been performed in over 20 other countries around the world. Peter Pan Goes Wrong was the trio’s second piece, opening in November 2014 for a UK tour before a hugely successful West End season in Christmas 2015. Henry, Henry, and Jonathan recently adapted the script of Peter Pan Goes Wrong for the BBC, which was filmed with the original West End cast and broadcast to rave reviews on New Year’s Eve. They were invited back to wreak more havoc at the BBC in 2017 with Christmas Carol Goes Wrong on BBC1. The Comedy About A Bank Robbery marks their third writing project as a trio and earned them another Olivier Nomination. @mischiefcomedy and mischieftheatre.co.uk

Chris Ross Cowan *

Jonathan Khalil LeSaldo *

Robert Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper *

Dennis Max Samuels *

Sandra Laura Darrell *

Max Dominic F. Russo *

Annie Lipica Shah *

Trevor J.Stephen Brantley *

* Member, Actors' Equity Association

Director Kevin R. Free

Scenic Designer Anita Stewart **

Costume Designer Patrice Trower

Lighting Designer Weston Wilkerson **

Sound Designer Seth Asa Sengel

Stage Manager Myles C. Hatch *

Movement Coordinator Michael Trautman

** Member, United Scenic Artists